The Taub Faculty of Computer Science Events and Talks

The recent ability to measure quickly and inexpensively dense sets of points on physical objects has deeply influenced the way engineers represent shapes in CAD systems, animation software or in the game industry. Many researchers advocated to completely bypass smooth surface representations, and to stick to a dense mesh model throughout the design process. Yet smooth analytic representations are still required in standard CAD systems and animation software, for reasons of compactness, control, appearance and manufacturability.

While classical NURBS surfaces are not well suited to represent arbitrary topologies, and subdivisions surface don’t provide explicit parameterizations, G1 continuous Bézier surfaces can be an interesting alternative for constructing smooth surfaces on triangular or quad meshes of arbitrary topological type.

In this talk we will first introduce the concept of G1 continuity for polynomial patches followed by an overview of the most relevant G1 surface models. We then give detailed insight in some selected surface constructions. Applications to fitting dense triangle meshes and to hierarchical spline modeling will close the talk.