A New Approach in CAD System for Designing Shoes

The flattening of digitized surfaces is still very important in design of thin walled objects such as the airplane wings, parts of car bodies, textile products, and shoe uppers. Especially in shoe industry, the ability of quick respond to changing market needs is essential for successful competition. To give needed flexibility to a shoe designer, special CAD CAM systems have been developed. Those systems are based on algorithms for surface reconstruction and surface flattening. In this article a fast algorithm for surface reconstruction and surface flattening is presented. Developable stripes are used to approximate a surface. In this way the surface can be flattened fast and without any distortions.