Watertight trimmed NURBS

This paper addresses the long-standing problem of the unavoidable gaps that arise when expressing the intersection of two NURBS surfaces using conventional trimmed-NURBS representation. The solution converts each trimmed NURBS into an untrimmed T-Spline, and then merges the untrimmed T-Splines into a single, watertight model. The solution enables watertight fillets of NURBS models, as well as arbitrary feature curves that do not have to follow isoparameter curves. The resulting T-Spline representation can be exported without error as a collection of NURBS surfaces. CR Categories: I.3.5 [Computer Graphics]: Computational geometry and object modeling--Curve, surface, solid, and object representations

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: TOG
• Authors: Thomas W. Sederberg, G. Thomas Finnigan, Xin Li, Hongwei Lin, Heather Ipson
• Keywords: Conventional Trimmed-NURBS Representation, NURBS, TOG 2008, Untrimmed T-splines