Construction of C∞ Surfaces From Triangular Meshes Using Parametric Pseudo-Manifolds

We present a new constructive solution for the problem of fitting a smooth surface to a given triangle mesh. Our construction is based on the manifold-based approach pioneered by Grimm and Hughes. The key idea behind this approach is to define a surface by overlapping surface patches via a gluing process, as opposed to stitching them together along their common boundary curves. The manifold based approach has proved to be well-suited to fit with relative ease, Ck-continuous parametric surfaces to triangle and quadrilateral meshes, for any arbitrary finite k or even k = ∞. Smooth surfaces generated by the manifold-based approach share some of the most important properties of splines surfaces, such as local shape control and fixed-sized local support for basis functions. In addition, the differential structure of a manifold provides us with a natural setting for solving equations on the surface boundary of 3D shapes. Our new manifold-based solution possesses most of the best features of previous constructions. In particular, our construction is simple, compact, powerful, and flexible in ways of defining the geometry of the resulting surface. Unlike some of the most recent manifold-based solutions, ours has been devised to work with triangle meshes. These meshes are far more popular than any other kind of mesh encountered in computer graphics and geometry processing applications. We also provide a mathematically sound theoretical framework to undergird our solution. This theoretical framework slightly improves upon the one given by Grimm and Hughes, which was used by most manifold-based constructions introduced before.