New Techniques for Subdivision Modelling

Abstract

Subdivision surfaces have reclaimed attention several years ago after their
application in full-featured 3D animation movies, such as Toy Story. Since then
and due to their attractive properties an ever increasing amount of research
papers emerged. Based on this huge amount of theoretical knowledge, we
present tools and techniques to facilitate practical 3D modelling which make
subdivision surfaces even more useful.
Our main contributions are:
* a subdivision scheme, which locally minimizes curvature variation, to
obtain surfaces which are locally as spherelike as possible; this surface
scheme is based on a tensor product of circular splines;
* a combined quadrilateral-hexagonal surface scheme which generates optimal
surfaces for initial meshes which contain both quadrilateral as well
as triangular regions;
* adding support for borders, sharp edges, and adaptivity to a hexagonal
subdivision scheme, to make this scheme more suitable for modelling in
practice;
* a construction algorithm for meshes optimized for Stam and Loop's
Quad/Triangle scheme; to our knowledge it is the first such algorithm
in the literature;
* a 3D sketching system taking 2D input, and generating 3D objects which,
when fold out to a plane, are identical again to the input curves.

Date of Award	3 Jul 2006
Original language	English
Supervisor	Peter Schelkens (Jury), Frank Van Reeth (Promotor) & Johan Claes (Co-promotor)