Computer-assisted design and fabrication of kinetic wire mechanisms

A system for design and fabrication of kinetic wire mechanisms, comprising:

• a data storage storing an animation including a set of keyframes defining differing poses for an object;
• a system controller running a computational tool that processes the animation to generate a wire structure model of the object matching the keyframes, wherein the computational tool determines locations for entities in the wire structure model to be bent with elastic deformation into two or more positions to provide movements of the object in the animation, wherein the data storage further stores a database of templates of the entities to be formed by bending a length of wire, and wherein the computational tool inserts one of the templates at each of the determined locations;
• and
• a wire bending machine operating to bend an input length of wire based on the wire structure model of the object to fabricate a kinetic wire mechanism including a plurality of the entities with locations and configurations matching the templates inserted into the wire structure model.

A method of designing a kinetic wire mechanism tailored for fabrication on a desktop bending machine, comprising:

• providing a generic template of a first entity with spring functionalities that cannot be formed via operation of a wire bending machine operating on an input length of wire and a plurality of templates of second entities that can be actuated to be elastically deformed into two or more positions and are suited for fabrication via wire bending;
• receiving as input a rig of an object and a set of target poses for the object;
• with the input, generating a wire structure model based on the rig and the set of target poses;
• identifying one or more locations for positioning the second entities in the wire structure model based on the set of target poses;
• positioning one or more of the second entities configured based on the generic template in the one or more locations;
• optimizing the positioned second entities configured based on the generic template by calibrating stiffness;
• for each of the optimized and positioned second entities, determining a matching set of the templates;
• and
• in the wire structure model, replacing each of the optimized and positioned second entities based on the generic template with a fabricable entity defined by one of the templates from a corresponding one of the matching sets of the templates.