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Automated Generation of Knit Patterns for Non-developable Surfaces

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Humanizing Digital Reality

Abstract

Knitting offers the possibility of creating 3D geometries, including non-developable surfaces, within a single piece of fabric without the necessity of tailoring or stitching. To create a CNC-knitted fabric, a knitting pattern is needed in the form of 2D line-by-line instructions. Currently, these knitting patterns are designed directly in 2D based on developed surfaces, primitives or rationalised schemes for non-developable geometries. Creating such patterns is time-consuming and very difficult for geometries not based on known primitives. This paper presents an approach for the automated generation of knitting patterns for a given 3D geometry. Starting from a 3D mesh, the user defines a knitting direction and the desired loop parameters corresponding to a given machine. The mesh geometry is contoured and subsequently sampled using the defined loop height. Based on the sampling of the contours the corresponding courses are generated and the so-called short-rows are included. The courses are then sampled with the defined loop width for creating the final topology. This is turned into a 2D knitting pattern in the form of squares representing loops course by course. The paper shows two examples of the approach applied to non-developable surfaces: a quarter sphere and a four-valent node.

The original version of this chapter was revised: For detailed information please see Erratum. The erratum to this chapter is available at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-6611-5_56.

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Acknowledgements

This research is supported by the NCCR Digital Fabrication, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. (NCCR Digital Fabrication Agreement#51NF40-141853). Machine knitting experiments and investigation into knitting machine and knitting software working has been done in collaboration with the Institute for Textile Machinery and High Performance Materials at the Technical University of Dresden.

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Correspondence to Mariana Popescu .

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Popescu, M., Rippmann, M., Van Mele, T., Block, P. (2018). Automated Generation of Knit Patterns for Non-developable Surfaces. In: De Rycke, K., et al. Humanizing Digital Reality. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-6611-5_24

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-6611-5_24

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