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Industrial knitting machines can produce finely detailed, seamless, 3D surfaces quickly and without human intervention. However, the tools used to program them require detailed manipulation and understanding of low-level knitting operations. We present a compiler that can automatically turn assemblies of high-level shape primitives (tubes, sheets) into low-level machine instructions. These high-level shape primitives allow knit objects to be scheduled, scaled, and otherwise shaped in ways that require thousands of edits to low-level instructions. At the core of our compiler is a heuristic transfer planning algorithm for knit cycles, which we prove is both sound and complete. This algorithm enables the translation of high-level shaping and scheduling operations into needle-level operations. We show a wide range of examples produced with our compiler and demonstrate a basic visual design interface that uses our compiler as a backend.
McCann et al. (2016) studied this question.