A Testbed for Surface Fairing Algorithms for Free-Form Surfaces
Author: Roland Göcke
Studienarbeit (Minor thesis), University of Rostock, Germany,
June 1997
Abstract
The goal of this project was the development and implementation of a
testbed to investigate surface fairing (= "smoothing") algorithms for
free-form surfaces. Surface fairing in the case of free-form surfaces
involves slight changes of the 3D location of certain control points
which define the geometry of the surface in order to produce a smoother
surface. The smoothness of a surface is determined by surface
interrogation methods (aka "quality analysing methods"). The testbed
provides an environment to experiment with different surface fairing
algorithms in order to determine their suitability. Surfaces, given in
the ENFF file structure, can be opened and viewed either as a wireframe
model or ray-traced surface. In the next step, certain characteristics
of the surface are calculated and visualised, for instance, the isophotes
of the surface. Based on this visualisation, the user can manually select
an area of the surface that requires smoothing (at the boundary of the
patches that make up the surface). The testbed will then automatically
try to smooth the chosen area using the selected surface fairing
algorithm. In this project, we used a smoothing algorithm based on the
minimisation of the differences of the 3rd order partial derivatives but
the modular structure of the testbed allows a simple way of adding other
algorithms.
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Last modified: Sat Mar 12 17:04:17 AUS Eastern Daylight Time 2005