Shuffler: Modeling with Interchangeable Parts

Many man made and natural objects are easily classified into families of models with a similar part-based structure. Example families include quadrupeds, humans, chairs, and airplanes. In this paper we present Shuffler – a modeling system that automates the process of creating new models by composing interchangeable parts from different existing models within each family. Our system does not require the users to perform any geometric operations; they simply select which parts should come from which input model, and the system composes the parts together. To enable this modeling paradigm, Shuffler precomputes the interchangeable parts across each input family of models by first segmenting the models into meaningful components and then computing correspondences between them. We introduce two new algorithms to perform the segmentation and to establish part correspondences that can also be used for many other applications in computer graphics.