Fitting Smooth Surfaces to Dense Polygon Meshes

Recent progress in acquiring shape from range data permits the acquisition of seamless million-polygon meshes from physical models. In this paper, we present an algorithm and system for converting dense irregular polygon meshes of arbitrary topology into tensor product B-spline surface patches with accompanying displacement maps. This choice of representation yields a coarse but efficient model suitable for animation and a fine but more expensive model suitable for rendering. The first step in our process consists of interactively painting patch boundaries over a rendering of the mesh. In many applications, interactive placement of patch boundaries is considered part of the creative process and is not amenable to automation. The next step is gridded resampling of eachboundedsectionof the mesh. Our resamplingalgorithm laysa grid of springs acrossthe polygonmesh, then iterates between relaxing this grid and subdividing it. This grid provides a parameterization for the mesh section, whic...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1996
• Where: SIGGRAPH
• Authors: Venkat Krishnamurthy, Marc Levoy
• Keywords: Computer Graphics, Displacement Maps, Product B-spline Surface, SIGGRAPH 1996, Tensor Product B-spline