Papers for

3d modeling software developers

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Parametric cad models created from sketches and descriptions

Rethinking Human Intent-to-CAD: Parametric CAD Model Generation via Cooperative Multi-Task Alignment and Spatial-Aware Reinforcement Learning

Abstract: Parametric Computer-Aided-Design (CAD) modeling from human intent remains challenging, particularly during the conceptual design stage, where design goals are expressed through incomplete and unstructured modalities (e.g., hand-drawn sketches and textual descriptions). In this work, we rethink the human intent-to-CAD pipeline and propose a unified method that directly maps multi-level human intents to executable codes, without assuming the prior existence of target CAD models. To support our study, we construct HiCAD, the first large-scale dataset aligning hand-drawn sketches, textual descriptions, and parametric CAD codes. Based on this, we introduce HiCAD, a two-stage framework comprising Cooperative Multi-Task Alignment to bridge the representational gap between heterogeneous inputs, and Spatial-Aware Reinforcement Learning to enforce geometric and topological consistency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing baselines across multiple tasks, validating its effectiveness and robustness in transforming heterogeneous human intents into high-fidelity parametric CAD models. Our project page: https://zqwlearning.github.io/HiCAD.

Sun 11 OctComputer Vision and Pattern RecognitionArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Designing 3D models using computers can be hard, especially when starting with rough ideas like sketches or text. The authors created a big dataset combining sketches, descriptions, and CAD codes to help computers learn these connections. They built a two-step method that first aligns different input types and then uses reinforcement learning to make sure the models are geometrically correct. Their approach works better than previous methods at turning human ideas into detailed CAD models.
Open → 2610.15681v1

Vision language model enables automated 3d maize plant modeling from point clouds

A Vision-Language Model (VLM)-based Pipeline for End-to-End Procedural Modeling of Field-Grown Maize from Point Clouds

Abstract: Editable 3D models of field-grown crops support high-throughput phenotyping and in silico breeding trials, but building them from scanned point clouds requires organ-level segmentation and fitting. Procedural generators can turn an organ-level parameter set into an analysis-suitable 3D model, but obtaining that set requires hours of manual tuning per plant or segmentation models trained on species-specific labels. We present an automated pipeline that reconstructs procedural maize models from raw 3D point clouds without manual tuning or species-specific training data. A multimodal vision-language model (VLM) annotates leaf midlines in rendered orthographic views. Deterministic geometric algorithms back-project the annotations onto the point cloud, merge them into 3D leaves by cross-view consensus, and grow the midlines to full blades on an orientation-weighted surface graph. Measured organ parameters populate a plant descriptor for a Non-Uniform Rational B-Spline (NURBS)-based procedural model generator. Each leaf surface is then refined against its scan points by differentiable NURBS fitting. The pipeline reached a median whole-plant Chamfer distance of 5.4 mm on 100 genotypically diverse field-grown maize plants from the MaizeField3D dataset. The reconstructions were closer to the scans than those of an earlier semi-automated pipeline based on manual annotations. The pipeline recovered 1,017 of 1,023 (99.4%) curated reference leaves at an intersection-over-union of at least 0.5 without using those labels as input. These results show that VLM annotations become usable organ-level measurements when downstream geometric stages can correct them. This makes automated generation of editable 3D plant assets feasible at the scale of modern phenotyping experiments.

Fri 2 OctComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Building detailed 3D models of maize plants grown in fields is important for studying plant traits and breeding, but it usually takes a lot of manual work or special training data. The authors created a way to make these 3D plant models automatically from raw 3D scans using a vision-language model to identify leaf shapes in images, which are then mapped back to the 3D data and refined into a procedural plant model. Their system worked well on hundreds of real maize plants, producing accurate and editable 3D models without needing manual annotations or species-specific training. This makes it easier to create large collections of detailed plant models for research and breeding.
Open → 2610.03468v1

OptimusMesh generates compact 3D triangle meshes from point clouds

OptimusMesh: Compact Autoregressive Mesh Generation from Point Clouds via Sparse Latent Pivots

Abstract: Generating compact and geometrically faithful 3D meshes directly from point clouds remains a fundamental challenge. Point clouds are unordered and sparse, whereas meshes exhibit irregular structure and varying topology. As a result, many existing approaches rely on implicit representations followed by surface extraction or reconstruction. Although effective, these pipelines can produce dense or over-smoothed meshes, often requiring computationally expensive post-processing and simplification. We present OptimusMesh, a framework for direct compact triangle mesh generation from point clouds using sparse latent pivot conditioning. Our key idea is to compress $2{,}048$ oriented input points into only $16$ sparse latent pivots, reducing the geometric conditioning set by $128\times$. These pivots provide a compact structural representation shared across a two-stage autoregressive framework that first generates mesh vertices and then predicts triangular faces conditioned on the generated vertices and the same pivots. Compared with the evaluated recent point-cloud-conditioned autoregressive methods, which use $257$ decoder-conditioning tokens, OptimusMesh uses only $16$, yielding a $16.1\times$ shorter conditioning sequence. Experiments show that OptimusMesh produces the most compact outputs among the compared recent autoregressive methods, using $25.7\%$--$94.1\%$ fewer faces while maintaining competitive geometric fidelity and distributional quality.

Thu 1 OctComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Creating 3D shapes from messy point clouds is tricky because point clouds are just scattered dots without order, while 3D shapes (meshes) have connected triangles and complex structures. The authors developed OptimusMesh, which compresses a large point cloud into a small set of key points called latent pivots. This small set helps generate the shape’s vertices and faces step-by-step, producing detailed but much simpler 3D shapes. Compared to other methods, OptimusMesh uses fewer points to guide the process and outputs fewer triangles without losing shape quality.
Open → 2610.01148v1

FunArt decodes movable parts and motions from single 3D scans

FunArt: Decoding Functional Structure and Articulation from Generative 3D Latents

Abstract: To operate effectively in human environments, robots must identify articulated objects, segment their movable and interactive parts, and estimate their kinematic models. Existing articulated scene representations typically recover kinematics from observed interactions, while methods operating on static scans often decouple articulation from functional interactive elements. We present FunArt, a framework that constructs articulation-aware functional 3D scene graphs from posed RGB-D observations captured in a single static configuration. FunArt reconstructs object instances, converts their fused geometry directly into the O-Voxel representation of TRELLIS.2, and exploits its frozen, sparse-compression VAE as a structural prior. A lightweight query-based decoder combines compact object-level latents with dense, surface-aligned features to jointly segment movable parts and functional interactive elements while estimating motion type, axis, origin, and range. On the Articulate3D dataset, FunArt achieves state-of-the-art performance across movable-part segmentation, articulation estimation, and functional-element segmentation, both with and without ground-truth object input. In the end-to-end setting, it outperforms the strongest baselines by 1.5 AP_{50} points for movable parts, 2.8 AP_{50} points under joint origin-and-axis constraints, and 6.7 AP_{50} points for functional elements. These results demonstrate that generative 3D latents encode actionable structural cues that can initialize robotic perception and planning before physical interaction.

Thu 17 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern RecognitionRobotics
The gist
Robots need to understand how parts on objects move to use them properly, but most methods require seeing those objects in motion. The researchers developed FunArt, a system that looks at a single 3D scan of an object to figure out its parts that can move, how they move, and how to interact with them. FunArt uses a special way to represent 3D objects and learns from general shapes to guess part boundaries and motion details without needing videos of the objects moving. This helps robots better plan how to manipulate objects just by seeing them once.
Open → 2609.20673v1

NeuSOGA3D explains 3D shapes from point clouds using symbolic geometry

NeuSOGA3D: A Neuro-Symbolic Framework for Explainable 3D Geometric Reconstruction

Abstract: Three-dimensional reconstruction from unorganized point clouds remains a challenging problem in computer vision, geometric modeling, and computer-aided design. While neural implicit methods achieve impressive reconstruction accuracy, geometry is typically encoded in latent representations that limit interpretability and reuse within engineering workflows. We present NeuSOGA3D (Neuro-Symbolic Geometric Abstraction in 3D), a hybrid framework that combines learned perceptual priors inherited from NeuSOGA with explicit symbolic geometric reasoning. The method projects point clouds onto principal orthographic planes, constructs symbolic implicit spline representations from the resulting observations, and fuses them through shape-preserving constructive solid geometry operations to generate a coarse visual hull. Additional geometric detail is recovered through cross-sectional decomposition and volumetric reconstruction using Partial Shape-Preserving Splines. Unlike conventional neural implicit approaches, NeuSOGA3D progressively transforms observations into explicit symbolic entities, including control polygons, implicit spline fields, cross-sections, and volumetric lofts. Experiments on all forty categories of the ModelNet40 benchmark demonstrate the ability of the framework to recover structurally meaningful and CAD-compatible geometric representations from diverse point-cloud observations. The results highlight the potential of combining learned perception with symbolic geometric reasoning for explainable geometric intelligence.

Thu 17 SeptArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Turning scattered 3D points into clear, usable shapes is tricky because many smart methods hide the shape details in hard-to-understand codes. The authors created NeuSOGA3D, which combines learned knowledge from neural networks with explicit symbolic shapes like splines and polygons. This approach gradually builds understandable geometric parts from raw points, making the 3D shapes easier to interpret and use in engineering. Tests showed it works well on many different object types, creating 3D models that fit engineering and design needs better.
Open → 2609.20323v1

Flip graphs for eight points in 3D space are fully connected

Flip Graphs for Eight Points in Three Dimensions Are Connected

Abstract: We prove that every configuration of four through eight points in three-dimensional space, with no four points coplanar, has a connected full geometric flip graph under $2 \leftrightarrow 3$ flips. Every point remains fixed and present throughout the sequence. The proof brings each tetrahedralization into placing form at a convex hull vertex: the tetrahedra not incident to that vertex fill the convex hull of the remaining points. This reduction allows us to establish connectivity by induction, using the connectivity of regular tetrahedralizations. The main geometric tool is radial projection, which turns the tetrahedra incident to a hull vertex into a planar triangulation. When this planar triangulation is regular, varying its lifting heights produces legal spatial flips that progressively shrink the region occupied by the incident tetrahedra and reach placing form. Planar lifting criteria and compatibility constraints between the projections at different hull vertices resolve the remaining small cases. For eight points, at most 35 flips are needed to reach placing form.

Sun 13 SeptComputational Geometry
The gist
The paper shows that for any arrangement of four to eight points in three-dimensional space, where no four points lie perfectly flat, you can move between different ways of connecting those points step-by-step without removing or adding points. The authors prove this by focusing on one special corner of the shape and breaking down the problem into easier parts. They use a technique that projects 3D shapes onto a flat surface, turning complex spatial connections into simpler planar ones to understand how to change the connections. This result means there is always a way to transform one tetrahedral arrangement into another through a sequence of simple flips.
Open → 2609.14797v1