FreeD: a freehand digital sculpting tool

Reviewer: Jiawei Ou

FreeD is a digital sculpting system that uses a predesigned 3D model to guide the sculpting activity of users, while preserving their freedom. With the aid of the computer, users are able to make on-the-spot creative decisions while minimizing the fabrication risk. The idea behind the system is simple: users employ a 3D location-aware milling device to perform sculpting. By mapping the real-world coordinate to a virtual scene, a 3D model is developed as a heuristic to guide the sculpting effort. When the milling bit approaches the model, the system will either slow down the spindle or draw back the shaft to protect the integrity of the model. The authors of this paper compare digital fabrication practice to traditional violin making, and argue that FreeD is able to operate in both camps. Moreover, the authors believe that it can be a very useful tool for learning sculpting. However, the overall merit of the work is hard to determine. Given that the model fabricated with FreeD is very coarse, it is hard to tell whether the software is actually able to improve on the user's performance or provide a better result compared to traditional carving or digital fabrication. Furthermore, one can also argue that a better result could be achieved by using the digital fabrication process to produce a coarse model as a starting point, and using the traditional carving technique to refine the result. Online Computing Reviews Service