WireSculptor: Interactive Guided Bending Workflow for Novice-Friendly Wire Sculpture Fabrication

This paper presents WireSculptor, an innovative interactive system designed to enable novices to create complex wire sculptures through an interactive guided bending workflow. In wire structure fabrication, manual bending offers flexibility in shaping intricate forms but is mainly suitable for experienced experts. To bridge this gap for novices, we construct a closed-loop guided bending workflow, which organically combines a visualization module for presenting precomputed bending instructions, and a bending error checker module for real-time error detection and feedback. To seek the most comfortable and effective bending setups for beginners, we apply a formative study on novices’ bending operations, where we test different bending settings to see how they affect the forming quality and time novices take. Leveraging formative study findings, we craft bending instructions with a coarse-to-fine approach. First, users bend large-scale wire units segmented by bending points of salient curvature change. Following this, they make precise adjustments guided by instructions from a graph-cut-based line-circular segment fitting method. Technical evaluations demonstrate that most first-time users achieve higher accuracy when guided by our method compared to the unguided methods, all while preserving artistic expressiveness. Furthermore, several application areas have been explored in greater depth, namely artistic fonts, line art, and the physicalization of children’s line drawing.