Concurrent Editing of Styling and Structure of Auto Body Based on Metamodels

Simulation-driven design can integrate the analysis and design together to provide a large amount of design knowledge at the early design phase, but at a cost of iterating between analysis and design. Because the heterogeneity of data representations in analysis and design impedes the translation between models in the two field, a framework based on curve met models is presented aiming at bridging the styling and structural design in auto body design process. Given a styling model and the FE model of an auto body, a pair of curve met models abstracting the given models is constructed with a set of cubic Bézier curves. The correspondence between the two metamodels is established via two mapping system, Joint mapping and Part mapping in order to yield intuitive deformation for structural metamodel according to the modification of the styling metamodel. With the deformed structural metamodel, the FE model is automatically updated using a skeleton-driven space deformation method. Numerical experiments show intuitive deformation results of the metamodel can be obtained with the proposed framework. And the updated FE models induced by the styling modification are in good mesh quality.