ReparamCAD: Zero-shot CAD Re-Parameterization for Interactive Manipulation

Abstract

Parametric CAD models encode entire families of shapes that should, in principle, be easy for designers to explore. However, in practice, parametric CAD models can be difficult to manipulate due to implicit semantic constraints among parameter values. Finding and enforcing these semantic constraints solely from geometry or programmatic shape representations is not possible because these constraints ultimately reflect design intent. They are informed by the designer's experience and semantics in the real world. To address this challenge, we introduce ReparamCAD, a zero-shot pipeline that leverages pre-trained large language and image model to infer meaningful space of variations for a shape We then re-parameterize a new constrained parametric CAD program that captures these variations, enabling effortless exploration of the design space along meaningful design axes. We evaluated our approach through five examples and a user study. The result showed that the inferred spaces are meaningful and comparable to those defined by experts. Code and data are at: https://github.com/milmillin/ReparamCAD.