Interactive sculpting of product shape based on constraint manipulation in virtual environment

In product concept design, not only designers with professional CAD skills, but also final customers take part in the design and evaluation of product shape styling. Because customers usually lack surface modelling background and are not familiar with concrete operations of commercial CAD systems, it is difficult for them to express their change intentions of product shape through professional CAD tools if they are not satisfied with the current shape design. This paper puts forward a method for creating, dragging and manipulating constraint and load represented in form of icon entity in interactive sculpting of product shape in virtual environment. The method supports customers manipulation of sculpting constraints or loads on sculpting shapes in virtual reality interaction to control the deformation of product shape. Constraints management based on icon entity is similar to spline lofting operation that is familiar to engineers, so users do not need to know surface details or have any professional knowledge of surface modelling, by only using their physical and engineering experience, they can manipulate the sculpting of product shape intuitively.