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Texture Mapping in Real Life

Researchers figure out how to dip coat complex creatures, like Shia LaBeouf

By Rain Noe - May 15, 2015

in Digital Fabrication

Hydrographic printing, a/k/a "dip coating" or "camo dipping," is a neat way to get complicated graphics onto complicated objects. It doesn't work well with undercuts, but as we showed you here, if you want to get a carbon-fiber graphic onto a game controller or a camouflage pattern onto an animal skull, it's pretty much the only game in town.

It's also woefully catch-as-catch-can. Trying to line the 2D pattern up with 3D contours is virtually impossible. But at this year's SIGGRAPH, a research collaboration between students from Columbia University and Zhejiang University presented their method for correcting this.

We're oversimplifying the description a bit, but the researchers essentially used texture mapping to figure out how a checkerboard pattern would wrap around various objects they modeled. They then skew their pattern to match the resultant distorted checkerboard and print the pattern out. Next, assuming they line the object up carefully over the pattern when they submerge it, they can convincingly dip-coat things like a cat, a zebra, and even Shia LaBeouf with a bad haircut.

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Here's the process in action:

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goodmaei .

9 years ago

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There was a company in Indiana that figured out this mapping around 2003 -- they were using it for thermoforming applications -- they closed ~2007 or 2008, but there is still some info out there about it.
https://www.rose-hulman.edu/~mellor/bmvc2003.pdf http://web.archive.org/web/20070128121333/http://www.elastic-image.com/

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Tony franchini

9 years ago

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That link you posted is dead. There are current thermoforming applications which utilize the camera and pattern mapping. Quadraxis is the top of the line software, I believe. I would be interested in hearing about any others though as I currently supervise a vutek that runs thermoformable inks.

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