Virtual prototyping for the textile industry: a framework supporting the production of crocheted objects

ABSTRACT

Over the last years, many progresses have been made in the field of virtual prototyping, pushed by the interest of industries and artisans. Especially in the context of the textile industry, the digitizing of the prototyping stage offers the possibility to validate the product design choices before committing to the market. This paper presents a framework for the virtual prototyping of crocheted objects. The core of the framework is an algorithm that is capable of generating the crocheting patterns for a given object and the corresponding instructions. The instructions are leveraged by the framework to visualize the 3D geometry of the object, and can be also used to craft it. Compared to previous works, the proposed algorithm combines a number of features (primarily, the use of parametric surfaces and the support for short rows) that can reduce the distortions in crafted object shape while also lowering computational cost; the algorithm is also able to consider material- and style-related information. The results of a comparison between the proposed algorithm and state-of-the-art approaches showed improved performance in terms of similarity of the generated shape with the target one, computation time, and appearance of the crafted object.

KEYWORDS:

• Virtual prototyping
• crocheting instruction generation algorithm
• short rows
• digital crafting
• parametric design

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Özgüç Çapunaman, co-author of the reference of work considered in the experimental evaluation, for making available the surfaces used in their research, thus enabling the comparison of achieved results.

Disclosure statement

The authors have no relevant financial or non-financial interests to disclose.

Author contributors

All the authors contributed to the study conception and design. The software was developed by Massimo Gismondi, under the supervision of Fabrizio Lamberti and Alberto Cannavò. The experimental analysis was performed by Massimo Gismondi with the support of Alberto Cannavò, and revised by Fabrizio Lamberti. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Alberto Cannavò, and all the authors worked on its revisions. All the authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Additional information

Funding

Research was supported by PON “Ricerca e Innovazione” 2014–2020 – DM 1062/2021 funds.