Create smooth continuous surface models in T-Splines for ergonomic design.

The customer Bjorn Syse Syse industriell design www.syse.se Compared to working with NURBS patches, the TSpline remains a single editable surface, and even better, will have up to 70% less control points situated only where needed. This makes it a charm when it comes to tweaking the surface to adjust the shape. - Bjorn Syse, Syse industriell design

The challenge

Products claiming an ergonomic benefit are often derived from working with physical models. Björn Syse of Syse industriell design was developing an ergonomic mouse based on medical research. After beginning shapefinding with clay models, he knew early on he was aiming for an organic shape.

Because of the unique contours of the ergonomic mouse, modeling this with NURBS would be very tedious.

The solution: T-Splines

By using T-Splines for Rhino, Syse was able to model this mouse as a single smooth surface, directly from input curves, saving time that otherwise would have been spent aligning patches and smoothing the surface if this model had been generated using a traditional NURBS approach.

The process The case study PDF document steps through the full design process--from creating the physical model, digitizing the curves, creating the T-Splines model, and producing the physical model. The ability to generate surfaces directly from contour curves made this workflow efficient.