Advancing the future of computational design.
Jigsaw pieces shaped like animals, silicone moulds for casting, stretched fabric that holds a designed curve. We develop the algorithms behind them.
Generative Whimsy Jigsaws
Whimsy puzzles hide animals, vehicles and characters in the outlines of their pieces. Designing them is hard. This method takes a set of text prompts and refines each piece's geometry with differentiable optimization, guided by a pre-trained diffusion model.
Jeremy Chew, Kenji Tojo, Nobuyuki Umetani, Bernd Bickel
Computational design and visual computing
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Interactive Design
Tools that let designers explore shape and performance together, in real time.
Designing with Tension → -
Geometry Processing
Fast, robust methods for representing, optimising and reconstructing shape.
Hierarchical ARAP → -
Computational Fabrication
Designing materials and structures so they behave as intended once built.
Discrete Interlocking Materials → -
Creative AI
Learning-based methods that generate, simulate and invert design problems.
Generative Whimsy Jigsaws →
A video model that predicts the wind.
Pedestrian wind comfort usually needs costly fluid simulations. WinDiNet repurposes a pretrained video diffusion model as a fast, differentiable stand-in. It generates full 112-frame rollouts in under a second, then optimises building positions directly.
Janne Perini*, Rafael Bischof*, Moab Arar, Ayça Duran, Michael A. Kraus, Siddhartha Mishra, Bernd Bickel
Publications
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Efficient Nano‑Optical Eye Tracking for Smart Glasses
Jipeng Sun, Lekang Yuan, Ruslan Guseinov, Bernd Bickel, Thabo Beeler, Thomas Auzinger, Felix Heide
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Inverse Rendering for Modeling with Line Primitives
Kenji Tojo, Ariel Shamir, Nobuyuki Umetani, Bernd Bickel
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Pretrained Video Models as Differentiable Physics Simulators for Urban Wind Flows
Janne Perini*, Rafael Bischof*, Moab Arar, Ayça Duran, Michael A. Kraus, Siddhartha Mishra, Bernd Bickel
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DiffSoup: Direct Differentiable Rasterization of Triangle Soup for Extreme Radiance Field Simplification
Kenji Tojo, Bernd Bickel, Nobuyuki Umetani
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Hierarchical Optimization of the As-Rigid-As-Possible Energy
Hendrik Meyer, Bernd Bickel, Marc Alexa
Our team
Computer scientists, architects and engineers.
Prof. Bernd Bickel
Dr. Bharath Seshadri
Dr. Pengbin Tang
Dr. Kenji Tojo
Dr. Sophia Kuhn
Anna Maria Eggler
Zhenyuan (Desmond) Liu
Jeremy Chew
Rafael Bischof
Yuhan Zhang
Yixin Zeng
Haoyang Zhou
Stefania Rasile
Malina Strugaru
Dominik Stoll
Fábio Porfírio da Costa
Dr. Michal Piovarči · Dr. Eleftherios Triantafyllidis · Manas Bhargava
Life at CDL
Write your thesis with us.
Current topics run from Gaussian splats to chocolate egg dispensers. We take Bachelor and Master thesis students interested in computational design, visual computing, interactive geometry processing, spatial computing, creative AI, computational fabrication and reinforcement learning.
Rafael Bischof
Email rabischof@ethz.chPhD and postdoc openings are announced here when available.
Available thesis topics · Bachelor & Master
- Inverse Generative Design of Microstructures for Additive Manufacturing
- Mechanics-Aware Deformation of Large-scale Discrete Interlocking Materials
- Solving Thermal Physics with Gaussian Splats
- Make Your Own Dice: Geometry Equilibrium Design with Spatially Varying Density Control
- Simulation and Computational Design of Chocolate Egg Dispensers
- Simulation of Material Extrusion for Inter-layer Bonding and Residue Stress Modeling