Moritz Bächer, Disney Research Zurich
Designing Physical Characters and Structures
December 12th, 2018, 14:00pm CET,
Room: Science Park Building 3, Room 063
Abstract:
Modern manufacturing technologies bear not only potential to revolutionize the manufacturing but also the construction industry. At the press of a button, we can build robotic components and architectural-scale structures of nearly unbounded complexity. With the aid of computational design tools leveraging physical simulation and optimization, we can exploit this available complexity to its full potential and create characters and structures that could not feasibly be designed manually.
In this talk, I will discuss techniques that aid with the design of kinetic wire characters and 3D printed architectural ornaments with stunning detail. The wire characters are tailored for fabrication on consumer-grade CNC bending machines while the ornaments are optimized for printing with large-scale binder jetting technologies. These techniques will serve as examples to demonstrate how one can utilize computation to navigate complex design spaces, identify optimal values for discrete and continuous design parameters, and safeguard against physically infeasible or structurally unsound designs.
About the Speaker:
Moritz Bächer is a Research Scientist at Disney Research where he leads the Computational Design and Manufacturing group. His research interests lie at the intersection of computer graphics and digital fabrication, spanning a wide range of computational aspects therein: computational and interactive design, physically-based and geometric modeling, and data-driven techniques. He applies his knowledge to tackle problems at the toy, animatronic, and architectural scale. Before joining Disney, he received a Ph.D. from the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and graduated with a Masters from ETH Zurich. His work has recently been featured as research highlight in the Communications of the ACM.
Due to legal reasons, we were not allowed to stream or record the talk.