Beady: Interactive Beadwork Design and Construction
Yuki Igarashi∗
Univ. of Tsukuba / JSPS Research Fellow

Takeo Igarashi†
The Univ. of Tokyo / JST ERATO

Jun Mitani‡
Univ. of Tsukuba / JST ERATO

Figure 1: System overview. (a) The user creates a design model. (b) The system runs a simulation on a structure model to adjust thegeometry. (c) The beadwork model visualizes the expected result. (d) The system computes the wire path. (e) The system provides a step-bystep construction guide. (f) The user manually constructs a physical beadwork.

1Introduction

Beadwork is the art of connecting beads together by wires. Whilecommon beadwork is two-dimensional (2D), three-dimensional(3D) beadwork is also popular in oriental regions such as Japanand China. However, the design and construction of 3D beadwork
is very difficult. The final shape is defined by the complicatedthree-dimensional interaction between beads and wires, thus making it very difficult to design manually. One also needs to specify
an appropriate wire path to hold the beads together and to manually insert the wire into the beads one by one following the path toconstruct the beadwork. Careful observation of existing beadwork
structures shows several geometrically interesting problems, whichmake beadwork design an interesting technical challenge.
This paper presents an interactive computational system to assist
the design of original beadwork and its construction. Fig. 1 shows
the overall process. The user first creates a polygonal mesh model,
called a design model, which represents the overall structure of thebeadwork (Fig. 1(a)). A bead of the beadwork is represented asan edge (not a vertex) of the design model. The system then converts the design model into a beadwork model by placing beads onthe edges with the appropriate wiring (Fig. 1(c)). Finally, the user
manually constructs the physical beadwork by following the stepby-step instruction generated by the system (Fig. 1(e, f)).
The design of a 3D model of a real-world object requires thatcertain physical constraints be satisfied. For example, a paper toy model has to be represented as a set of developable
patches. This kind of restriction is often discussed in the design of architecture consisting of freeform surfaces [Liu et al. 2006;
Schiftner et al. 2009]. Pottmann et al. [2010] called this new research area architectural geometry. Related to this trend, recent
work presented methods to slightly modify the geometry of a polygonal mesh to reduce the number of unique polygons contained in theoriginal model [Singh and Schaefer 2010; Eigensatz et al. 2010;
Fu et al. 2010].Our work differs in that we support the interactive
design of a model instead of pursuing automatic conversion.
The contributions of this work are summarized as follows. (1) We
present a mesh modeling user interface specialized for beadwork
models by combining gestural operations and physical simulations.
(2) We present an algorithm based on face stripification to compute wire paths for a beadwork model designed by the user. (3) We
present a step-by-step construction guide to assist the user in the∗ e-mail: yukim@acm.org† e-mail:takeo@acm.org‡ e-mail:mitani@cs.tsukuba.ac.jp

manual construction process. (4) We show the feasibility and effectiveness of our approach by presenting a solid implementation.

2 User Interface
2.1 Geometric Modeling
The system provides a specialized modeling interface for the design of a simple polygonal mesh model with uniform edge length.
The user first builds an approximate shape by combining predefined primitives. Next, the user modifies the shape by applying basic mesh editing operations such as face extrusion, edge insertion,edge split, edge deletion, and vertex merger (Fig. 2). We provide amodeless gestural interaction for applying these operations to support rapid exploration. The system also allows the user to add auxiliary parts (bead chains) to the model. The user specifies the colorand shape of individual beads in the beadwork model by using apainting interface.
Primitive addition
Edge insertion

Face extrusion
Vertex merger

Edge split

Chain addition
Edge deletion

Figure 2: Mesh editing operations.

2.2 Construction Guide
The system guides the manual construction of a physical beadworkby showing step-by-step instruction. The traditional printed beadwork instructions in textbooks use a specialized 2D diagram representation as the guide, but it is very tedious and difficult because theuser needs to keep track of the relation between beads in the physical 3D beadwork and those in the 2D instruction. Our step-by-step
instruction takes advantage of the expressiveness of interactive 3D

graphics and makes it easier to understand the construction procedure.

(a) Design model

(a)

(b)

(c)

(d)

(e)

(b) Structure model(c) Wire graph(d) An Euler path of (c)(f)
3Figure 3: An example of the visual construction guide. (a) Initialstate. (b,c,f) Blue wire passes a newly added bead. (d) Red wire
passes a newly added bead. (e) Red wire passes an existing bead.

4

1

2

5
6

The construction guide shows which wire passes which bead ineach step as 3D graphics. Fig. 3 shows an example sequence.
The user can view each step from an arbitrary viewing direction.
The user presses the “next” button to proceed to the next step andpresses the “prev” button to return to the previous step.

3

Algorithm

Conversion of the design model into a beadwork model consists of
two main steps. The first step is geometry computation. The systemgenerates another polygonal mesh model, called a structure model,
by adding local wire connections between neighboring beads of thedesign model (Fig. 1(b)). The system runs a physical simulation tocompute the geometry of the resulting beadwork model by considering the physical interaction among beads and wires. This simulation runs during interactive modeling and updates the shape of thedesign model after each editing operation. The second step is wire
path planning (Fig. 1(d)). The wire path should be appropriately
defined to efficiently connect the beads. We show that a valid wire
path is given as an Euler loop on a graph derived from the structure
model.
We start the process with the structure model (Fig. 4(b)). It defines
the local wire connectivity. A global wire path is given as a loopthat meets all wire edges once and all bead edges twice. This is theEuler loop of the wire graph (Fig. 4(c)), obtained by contracting thebead edges into vertices, with an additional constraint that a wiregoing into a bead should go out from the other side of the bead. The
existence of an Euler loop is guaranteed by the construction because
each bead edge always has four wire edges. Various methods exist
for obtaining such an Euler loop.
However, an arbitrary Euler loop (e.g., Fig. 4(d)) can be inconvenient in the manual construction process because it can cause many
unstable beads during construction (Fig. 4(e)). An unstable beadmakes manual construction extremely difficult because the user has
to manually hold it. We consider a bead to be stable when the position of the bead is stably fixed to a specific location by the wires.
We carefully examined existing beadwork designs and found thatthe problem of reducing unstable beards can be solved by using aface strip (Figs. 4(f, g)). The design model is covered by a face
strip, and then a wire path is placed so that it completes the faces inthe strip one by one.
This method makes the beads in the previously visited faces all stable during construction (Fig. 4(h)). However, a single wire pathoften makes manual construction process difficult. We therefore
present an algorithm that covers the design model with multiple
face strips with short branches, where each strip corresponds to awire.

4Results

The prototype system is implemented using Java on a laptop (1.2GHz CPU, 2 GB RAM). The top two rows of Fig. 5 show some(e) Intermediatestatus of (d)(f) Typical wire path(g) Face strip
strucutre of (f)(h) Intermediatestatus of (f)Figure 4: Details of the wire path-planning algorithm. Yellow
beads are stable beads and pink beads are unstable beads.

example beadwork designed and constructed by using the system.
Designing these models required 10 to 20 minutes including creative experimentation and exploration. Manual construction of eachby following the guide required a few hours. The beadwork bear isan exception: it was bought at a local shop. We created the modelby referring to the product spending approximately 90 minutes.

Figure 5: Example models designed by the authors. Top: designmodels. Middle: beadwork models. Bottom: real beadworks.

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