“3D Sketch”, developed by PhD students Joon Hyub Lee and Hanbit Kim, and Professor Seok-Hyung Bae from the Department of Industrial Design, is a novel three-dimensional sketching tool that allows users to immediately animate their sketches. Users are able to rotate the x, y, z axes to draw in 3D. Manipulating different parts of the sketches with fingers and touch gestures allows the program to learn the pivot and the movement of the pieces and the users to play around with their 3D sketch. Likewise, designers can easily switch between operations such as sketching, segmenting, rigging, posing, and filming to articulate a desired 3D animation.

The new design tool serves to minimize the gap between 2D sketches and 3D modeling. Traditional 3D Computer Aided Design (CAD) tools such as Rhino and Fusion 360 are formatted to build sophisticated geometry work, which makes it time-consuming to create a moving object even for design experts. Meanwhile, 3D Sketch allows drawings made with a stylus pen on a digital tablet to transform into a moving 3D animation in just 10 minutes. Therefore, it is fit to be used in the earlier stages of design to explore a wide range of ideas quickly.

This research received an “Emerging Technologies Award Honorable Mention” at the Association of Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (ACM SIGGRAPH) 2022 in Vancouver, one of the biggest conferences in the field of computer graphics. World-renowned film and animation companies, including Marvel and Pixel, praised the team’s research as “a kind of tool that would be useful to Pixar’s creative model designers.” Now that designers are able to demonstrate their ideas in 3D animated concepts more quickly and easily than in the past, the tool is expected to enlighten designers with various ideas and to be used widely in areas such as content creation, manufacturing, and the Metaverse industry.