C-Tubes: Design and Optimization of Tubular Structures Composed of Developable Strips

Michele Vidulis* · Klara Mundilova* · Quentin Becker* · Florin Isvoranu · Mark Pauly
(* denotes equal contribution)

About

This repository contains the source code and data for C-Tubes: Design and Optimization of Tubular Structures Composed of Developable Strips, published at SIGGRAPH 2025.

Installation

Clone the repository recursively:

git clone --recurse-submodules git@github.com:EPFL-LGG/C-tubes.git

If you already cloned the repository without the --recurse-submodules flag, run:

git submodule update --init --recursive

To create a conda environment and install the dependencies run:

cd C-tubes
conda env create -f environment.yml
conda activate C-tubes

and install the Ctubes package in editable mode:

pip install -e .

Optional Dependencies

pytorch3d, used in the minimal surface example in notebooks/figures/fig17_min_surf.ipynb, can be optionally installed via pip:

pip install "git+https://github.com/facebookresearch/pytorch3d.git"

For development, installing the nbstripout git filter is recommended to avoid committing large outputs in Jupyter notebooks:

nbstripout --install

Running the Code

With the conda environment activated, you can run a Jupyter notebook by starting a Jupyter Lab server in the repository root folder:

jupyter lab

The notebook notebooks/demo.ipynb provides a quick overview of the main features of the codebase.

To reproduce the figures in the paper, run the notebooks in notebooks/figures/. The output of each notebook is saved in a separate folder in notebooks/figures/output/.

To execute all the notebooks in notebooks/figures/ at once and generate all the data from the paper, run:

cd notebooks/figures
python run_all.py

Citation

If you use this codebase in your project, please consider citing our work:

@article{10.1145/3730933,
  author = {Vidulis, Michele and Mundilova, Klara and Becker, Quentin and Isvoranu, Florin and Pauly, Mark},
  title = {C-Tubes: Design and Optimization of Tubular Structures Composed of Developable Strips},
  year = {2025},
  issue_date = {August 2025},
  publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
  address = {New York, NY, USA},
  volume = {44},
  number = {4},
  issn = {0730-0301},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3730933},
  doi = {10.1145/3730933},
  month = jul,
  articleno = {154},
  numpages = {19}
}