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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(c) Roland Göcke
Last modified: Sat Mar 12 17:04:17 AUS Eastern Daylight Time 2005