The Art of Touch-n-Curl: Designing Curvilinear Sculptures via Interlocking 3D Printed Zippers

The Art of Touch-n-Curl: Designing Curvilinear Sculptures via Interlocking 3D Printed Zippers
Fanke Qi, Fanqi Zhou, Ruoyu Zhai, Deying Pan, Yongbo Ni, Tianshu Dong, Yitao Fan, Guanyun Wang

UIST 2025: The ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology

This demo presents a design suite of curvilinear animal sculptures using Touch-n-Curl, a design and construction pipeline that encodes space curves with a pair of 3D printed flat zippers manually interlocking together in space into corresponding 3D shapes. The pipeline requires users to input a 3D spatial curve, but creating such curves accurately and efficiently can be challenging for users. To address this issue and unleash creativity, a parametric tool is designed to offer an intuitive way to generate space curves for initial reference, enabling beginners readily obtain valid and satisfactory curves. The tool adopts meshes available on the internet as input, and the output is contour curves that users can adjust to meet their needs and later feed into the pipeline to generate zippers. Based on the output curves, the demo shows a design suite of curvilinear animal sculptures. We believe the demo imbues abstract curves with perceptible vitality that inspire artists to create even more beautiful curvilinear artworks.

DOI:: doi.org/10.1145/3746058.3760442
Web:: https://programs.sigchi.org/uist/2025/program/content/209494

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