Freeform Surface Copy-and-Paste: A Mechanism for Transferring Brand-Identity Elements From One Object to Another

The goal of this work is to provide industrial designers with an intuitive mechanism for transferring brand-identity elements from one object to another, and to allow manual modifications of physical prototype details to be scanned and reincorporated back into original digital models. An algorithm to copy-and-paste freeform details from one freeform surface to another using displacement field and planar parameterization operators is presented. A tool based on the algorithm is developed such that, from the designer’s viewpoint, details from one surface can be mapped to another in two steps: the selection of the detail to transfer (copy); and the choice of the surface onto which the detail is to be mapped (paste). A proof of concept has been implemented and is used to demonstrate the capabilities of the framework.