Timo Friedrich, Sebastian Schmitt, Stefan Menzel, "Rapid Creation Of Vehicle Line-ups By Eigenspace Projections For Style Transfer ", Design 2020 - 16th international design conference, no. 1, pp. 867-876, 2020.

In product development, an automated generation of shape variations enables a rapid assessment of potentially appealing future design directions. In the present paper, we propose a framework for computing a product line-up of 3D automotive body shapes based on spectral methods for mesh processing. Our proposed method utilizes the visual features extracted as style from a designed car model and projects them onto differently shaped car models, e.g. abstracted prototypes from other car segments which function as so-called content placeholders. To extract the style of a model, we calculate the eigenspace projections of the 3D vehicle meshes and identify the relevant components based on their eigenvalues. We show that the style encodes in the high frequency equivalent eigenspace projections while the content is represented by the low frequency fractions. The approach relies on homogeneous meshes and produces smooth results with minimal user supervision compared to a manual editing of 3D meshes. Our proposed style transfer allows for a rapid vehicle portfolio generation from small sized cars up to SUVs and trucks, and results in an early visual assessment of the model line-up. We demonstrate and discuss in several test cases the suitability and limitations of the method in the automotive design context.