Beady: Interactive Beadwork Design and Construction

We introduce the interactive system ``Beady'' to assist the design and construction of customized 3D beadwork. The user first creates a polygonal mesh model called the design model that represents the overall structure of the beadwork. Each edge of the mesh model corresponds to a bead in the beadwork. We provide two methods to create the design model. One is interactive modeling from scratch. The user defines the mesh topology with gestural interaction and the system continuously adjusts edge lengths by considering the physical constraints among neighboring beads. The other is automatic conversion that takes an existing polygonal model as input and generates a near-hexagonal mesh model with a near-uniform edge length as output. The system then converts the design model into a beadwork model with the appropriate wiring. Computation of an appropriate wiring path requires careful consideration, and we present an algorithm based on face stripification of the mesh. The system also provides a visual step-by-step guide to assist the manual beadwork construction process. We show several beadwork designs constructed by the authors and by test users using the system.

Results

Example beadworks created from existing 3D models.
(left) These are CG shapes rendered using commercial software (e-frontier Shade8).
(right) Photo of the real beadworks. The diameter of a bead is 4mm.

Demonstrations

Demo Program ( beady_en.zip Java2)

Related publications

Yuki Igarashi, Takeo Igarashi and Jun Mitani. Beady: Interactive Beadwork Design and Construction. ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 2012), Volume 31, Issue 4, Article No. 49, Los Angels, USA, August 2012. PDF

Yuki Igarashi, Takeo Igarashi and Jun Mitani. "Beady: Interactive Beadwork Design and Construction" . ACM SIGGRAPH Asia 2011 Technical Sketch, Hong Kong, Dec. 2011. PDF (Interactive modeling only.)