Exploiting hand sketching in educating 'mechanically oriented' engineering students

The financial support provided by the University of Malta through the research grant ‘Innovative 'Early Stage' Design Product Prototyping’ (IMERP02-01).It is well known that even though Computer-Aided Design (CAD) systems are available, sketching is still widely used in design synthesis. Mechanical engineering students must therefore be cultured and trained to exploit sketching during this crucial activity in the basic design cycle. However, in our years of experience in training such students we found a strong tendency that due to the overall knowledge transfer they receive, these future engineers tend to be oriented in mainly thinking and presenting details of their design solution. Whilst clearly design solutions need to be eventually described in detail for their successful realization, good detailed design solutions do not make up for poor solution concepts generated. In this paper, we therefore present the overall pedagogic approach adopted at the University of Malta in exploiting sketching both for expressing working principle solutions and also for early form design. In addition, this paper outlines how a prescribed sketching language was developed to enable co-located students to quickly express and exchange 3D CAD models of their sketches, all this helping in making 'global design' truly feasible even at the early design stages.peer-reviewe

Freeform User Interfaces for Graphical Computing

報告番号: 甲15222 ; 学位授与年月日: 2000-03-29 ; 学位の種別: 課程博士 ; 学位の種類: 博士(工学) ; 学位記番号: 博工第4717号 ; 研究科・専攻: 工学系研究科情報工学専

Feature-rich distance-based terrain synthesis

This thesis describes a novel terrain synthesis method based on distances in a weighted graph. The method begins with a regular lattice with arbitrary edge weights; heights are determined by path cost from a set of generator nodes. The shapes of individual terrain features, such as mountains, hills, and craters, are specified by a monotonically decreasing profile describing the cross-sectional shape of a feature, while the locations of features in the terrain are specified by placing the generators. Pathing places ridges whose initial location have a dendritic shape. The method is robust and easy to control, making it possible to create pareidolia effects. It can produce a wide range of realistic synthetic terrains such as mountain ranges, craters, faults, cinder cones, and hills. The algorithm incorporates random graph edge weights, permits the inclusion of multiple topography profiles, and allows precise control over placement of terrain features and their heights. These properties all allow the artist to create highly heterogeneous terrains that compare quite favorably to existing methods