Innovative method for rapid development of shoes and footwear

In the present work, a novel set of software tools for the rapid development of shoes and footwear is presented aimed at strongly reducing the design time and then the time-to-market of the products. These tools are mainly based on an implementation of Constrained Free Form Deformation techniques and on the use of modern surface scanning methods. The proposed approach allows, in many cases, to avoid the mathematical surface reconstruction and to quickly generate the complex geometries that CAM systems will process in order to generate the tool paths for mold manufacturing.