Digital design of crack patterns with natural impressions on pottery

With the rapid development in production technology, it is becoming increasingly difficult to identify high-quality industrial products. Thus, appearance design is considered an important factor for deciding quality. There is increasing burden on the designer to develop a design that matches the preferences of a large number of consumers. For this reason, it is imperative to develop a system that can efficiently generate numerous patterns at the early stages of the design process. One of the patterns preferred by many customers is that with a natural impression. Therefore, an approach to derive a pattern exhibiting a natural impression, based on natural phenomena, is considered to be suitable for obtaining designs preferred by a large number of users, and it is believed to be a support tool to designers. The purpose of this study is to develop a system capable of obtaining a pattern design exhibiting a natural impression by quantifying natural phenomena. This paper focuses on crack formation, a natural phenomenon, which can be seen on pottery surfaces. Based on the mechanism of formation of real cracks, a method for generating crack patterns via a mechanical process is developed, and design generation by a basic system is performed. The fractal dimensions of the generated crack patterns are calculated by fractal analysis, and the effectiveness of the patterns is quantitatively verified based on fractal dimensions from the viewpoint of naturalness.