Computer aided style design system based on highlight lines

Free-form surfaces are useful for modeling the external shape of industrial products but designers are still facing difficulty in designing high-quality aesthetic surfaces because commercial CAD systems currently available lack the required performance to support their design work. This has therefore led to the increasing need for design-aiding modeling systems to enhance the efficiency of high quality surface design processes. This paper proposes a method of redesigning aesthetic surface shapes by controlling unit normal vectors on the surface and discusses a fundamental system constructed based on the proposed technique. Attempts were also made to construct the required character lines using the proposed technique. Additionally, the validity of the proposed technique was also verified. In the surface evaluation stage of existing product design processes, the highlight-check method using highlight lines on the surface of a model is the most common and popular evaluation method even though methods using curvature and isophote have been proposed. With this method, the unit normal vectors on the surface are controlled by highlight lines. A highlight line is defined as a curve which consists of points with a constant angle to the right reflective direction when a beam shines on an arbitrary point on a surface. With this highlight-check system, highlight lines are displayed on the screen and evaluated by the designer. When highlight lines are faulty or those required by the designer cannot be obtained, the designer just needs to enter the required highlight lines manually by drawing with a pen tablet on LCD interactive display to improve surface quality. Usually, the system takes input highlight line information as unit normal vector information, and constructs the required surface shape using that information.