CS 285: SOLID MODELING, Spring 2002

Assignment #3

Planning a SLIDE Description of a Solid Model

This is a direct follow-on to Assignment #1. It is another exercise to come up with a -- hopefully more concrete -- design plan for a water-tight B-rep of a solid part. Designing things that could be made is the focus of this course, -- and an explicit plan that is realizable with the available tools is a crucial part of a good design!

There is a saying: "Your designs are defined by your tools." To make the most of a tool, you have to understand its strength and weaknesses. This exercise will be aimed at using SLIDE, so keep the list of possible constructs available in SLIDE foremost in your mind when you plan how to attack the design tasks below. Try to come up with a realistic plan, so that if I were to ask you next week to actually do it, you could indeed carry out your plan.

On this assignment you will work in pairs, as a team, doing two design plans for two quite different objects. (And thus the issues you will have to think about will be quite different.)

1) Parameterized Spoon

Again, make a plan for a parametrized generator for a spoon. However, your generator should have exactly three parameters -- so choose them judiciously. The result should be a viable solid model for manufacturing on an SFF machine, i.e., a closed, non-self-intersecting, water-tight B-rep.

2) N-sided Fair Die

This object has only one parameter: "N" the number of facets. You are to make a generator for a polyhedral object with exactly N faces that can be used as a fair die; i.e., on average it will end up coming to rest on any of its N faces with equal likelyhood. N should be variable from 4 to 100.

THE TEAMS

Write-up:

Please hand in your write-up (about 1 page) at the beginning of class on 2/11/02. Write the names of both team members on your hand-in.

Also be prepared to describe your design plan to the class in about 2-3 minutes.

Due Date: Monday 2/11/2002, 9:10am

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