This paper has been published in the ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing Communications and Applications, February 2022. (ACM DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3475798).

This work is supported in part by the Ministry of Science and Technology(under nos. 108-2221-E-006-038-MY3 and 110-2221-E-006-135-MY3), Taiwan, Republic of China.

Wire sculptures are sculpted objects by the use of wires. In this paper, we propose practical methods to create 3D virtual wire sculptural art from a given 3D model. In contrast, most of the previous 3D wire art results are reconstructed from input 2D wire art images. Artists usually tend to design their wire art with a single wire if possible. If not possible, they try to create it with the less number of wires. To follow this general design trend, our proposed method generates 3D virtual wire art with the minimum number of continuous wire lines. To achieve this goal, we first adopt a greedy approach to extract important edges of a given 3D model. These extracted important edges become the basis for the subsequent lines to roughly represent the shape of input model. Then, we connect them with the minimum number of continuous wire lines by the order obtained by optimally solving a travelling salesman problem with some constraints. Finally, we smooth the obtained 3D wires to simulate the real 3D wire results by artists. In addition, we also provide a user interface to control the winding of wires by their design preference. Finally, we experimentally show our 3D virtual wire results, and evaluate these created results. As a result, the proposed method is computed effectively and interactively, and results are appealing and comparable to real 3D wire art work.

Index terms -- Wire sculpture, edges, 3D wire art, edge segments, wire composition, smoothing