Scale-aware black-and-white abstraction of 3D shapes

Flat design is a modern style of graphics design that minimizes the number of design attributes required to convey 3D shapes. This approach suits design contexts requiring simplicity and efficiency, such as mobile computing devices. This `less-is-more' design inspiration has posed significant challenges in practice since it selects from a restricted range of design elements (e.g., color and resolution) to represent complex shapes. In this work, we investigate a means of computationally generating a specialized 2D flat representation - image formed by black-and-white patches - from 3D shapes. We present a novel framework that automatically abstracts 3D man-made shapes into 2D binary images at multiple scales. Based on a set of identified design principles related to the inference of geometry and structure, our framework jointly analyzes the input 3D shape and its counterpart 2D representation, followed by executing a carefully devised layout optimization algorithm. The robustness and effectiveness of our method are demonstrated by testing it on a wide variety of man-made shapes and comparing the results with baseline methods via a pilot user study. We further present two practical applications that are likely to benefit from our work.