Incorporating free-form features in aesthetic and engineering product design: State-of-the-art report

The use of free-form shapes has become mainstream to design complex products that have to fulfil engineering requirements as well as aesthetic criteria. Even if today’s CAD systems can easily represent free-form shapes by means of NURBS surfaces, their definition and modification still require a deep knowledge and a great skill in the manipulation of the underlying mathematical models. The implemented free-form shapes design operators are time consuming and do not enable fast modifications. To overcome these limits, some researches have been undertaken to try to adapt the feature concept, successfully adopted for the design of regular shapes, in the free-form domain. It gives rise to a set of free-form features modelling strategies. This paper gathers together the state-of-the-art of these advances. The various approaches are depicted and compared with respect to a very precise set of criteria expressing the needs in aesthetic and engineering designs. The limits and future trends are presented.