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

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.