The Taub Faculty of Computer Science Events and Talks

This talk will be about the problem of discrete constrained Willmore surfaces: discrete surfaces that have minimal total squared mean curvature while also being discretely conformally equivalent to a given input surface. The Willmore energy is a bending energy, used to model elastic behavior and measure surface smoothness. Adding the conformality constraint turns the problem into a natural extension, in 2D, of classical elastic spline modeling in 1D. This not only makes the use of Willmore functional more practical for a geometric modeling setting, but also leads to more interesting, visually appealing surfaces with rich geometric features. In this talk, I will discuss both theoretical contributions, as well as a practical and efficient algorithm to solve this numerically challenging problem.