I supervised this Master’s thesis by Shadan Sadeghian.
About
The rise of personal fabrication due to fast advance of technology in producing smaller and cheaper computer controlled machines is known as the coming industrial revolution. As 3d printers found their way from industries to offices and homes the range of users changed from designers and experts in 3d modeling to almost everyone with every level of knowledge. This made it a problem for novice home users to design and model their desired objects to fabricate them. Despite the fact that in recent years several user friendly 3d modeling packages such as Sketchup or 123d Design were released, people still found it hard and time consuming learning them and get an acceptable result. Another solution to this problem are 3d model libraries, libraries such as Thingiverse and Ponoko offer a big data base of works of designers and 3d modelers were novice users can download and print. However there still exists a drawback which is that to change a part or dimensions of a model downloaded from the library one still needs to have the modeling skills. Despite what is mentioned the problem is not just limited to the novice users, sometimes experts in 3d modeling spend a lot of time to understand the code of the model they have downloaded from a library just to make a small change, and this makes it difficult for them to reuse each others’ work and and sometimes they would rather start everything from the beginning. Parashape is an approach to solve these problems for both groups of CAD experts and novice users by presenting the idea of having a part based 3d model customizer.
More Information
http://hci.rwth-aachen.de/parashape