Interactive hexagonal mesh editing for beadwork design

Beadwork is the art of connecting beads together with wire. Igarashi et al. [2012] presented an interactive beadwork design system called Beady to help non-professionals design their own 3D beadwork. They observed that existing beadwork designs, especially large ones, typically consist of hexagonal faces. This is probably because a hexagonal mesh (honeycomb lattice) is the most efficient structure for holding flat surfaces with minimal support materials. After conducting physical simulations, they also found that a near-hexagonal mesh, obtained as the dual of a triangular mesh, yields a more aesthetically pleasing beadwork model. However, the interactive modeling interface of the original Beady system did not consider this. Thus the user had to carefully combine various editing operations to construct a near-hexagonal polyhedron. Existing 3D modeling software is also inconvenient for near-hexagonal mesh modeling. Therefore, we introduce mesh-editing operations specifically designed for creating near-hexagonal polyhedra. By combining the original Beady interface with our method, the user can more easily design near-hexagonal polyhedra.