We explore the fabrication of curved surfaces by reusing panels extracted from decommissioned wind turbine blades, using cycling pumptracks as a case study. We first present real-world prototypes of pumptrack modules that we manufactured to evaluate the practicality of this reuse scenario and to define the boundary conditions for harvesting blade panels and assembling a track. We then propose an algorithm to optimize the segmentation of a wind turbine blade into quadrilateral panels whose sides fall within a small set of compatible boundaries. These panels form a library of modules that designers can connect side by side to create pumptracks of various lengths and curvatures. Together, these contributions provide a proof-of-concept of how computer-aided design and manufacturing can support circular design through the reuse of curved surfaces. ... Read more

Construction industry needs large volumes of materials and has a large carbon footprint. And although wind energy is renewable, the blades are hard to recycle leading to material waste. Our goal is to form a virtuous loop between these sectors by reusing wind turbine blades as construction elements. However, designing and building new structures from parts of existing ones raises novel design challenges in terms of geometry, structural properties and performance, processing and assembly. [...] ... Read more

Product designers extensively use sketches to create and communicate 3D shapes and thus form an ideal audience for sketch-based modeling, nonphotorealistic rendering and sketch filtering. However, sketching requires significant expertise and time, making design sketches a scarce resource for the research community. We introduce OpenSketch, a dataset of product design sketches aimed at offering a rich source of information for a variety of computer-aided design tasks. OpenSketch contains more than 400 sketches representing 12 man-made objects drawn by 7 to 15 product designers of varying expertise. We provided participants with front, side and top views of these objects, and instructed them to draw from two novel perspective viewpoints. This drawing task forces designers to construct the shape from their mental vision rather than directly copy what they see. They achieve this task by employing a variety of sketching techniques and methods not observed in prior datasets. Together with industrial design teachers, we distilled a taxonomy of line types and used it to label each stroke of the 214 sketches drawn from one of the two viewpoints. While some of these lines have long been known in computer graphics, others remain to be reproduced algorithmically or exploited for shape inference. In addition, we also asked participants to produce clean presentation drawings from each of their sketches, resulting in aligned pairs of drawings of different styles. Finally, we registered each sketch to its reference 3D model by annotating sparse correspondences. We provide an analysis of our annotated sketches, which reveals systematic drawing strategies over time and shapes, as well as a positive correlation between presence of construction lines and accuracy. Our sketches, in combination with provided annotations, form challenging benchmarks for existing algorithms as well as a great source of inspiration for future developments.We illustrate the versatility of our data by using it to test a 3D reconstruction deep network trained on synthetic drawings, as well as to train a filtering network to convert concept sketches into presentation drawings. We distribute our dataset under the Creative Commons CC0 license: Https://ns.inria.fr/d3/OpenSketch. ... Read more