On smooth bicubic surfaces from quad meshes

Abstract

Abstract Determining the least m such that one mxm bi-cubic macro- patch per quadrilateral offers enough degrees of freedom to construct a smooth surface by local operations regardless of the vertex valences is of fundamental interest; and it is of interest for computer graphics due to the impending ability of GPUs to adaptively evaluate polynomial patches at animation speeds. We constructively show that m = 3 suffices, show that m = 2 is unlikely to always allow for a localized construction if each macro-patch is internally parametrically C 1 and that a single patch per quad is incompatible with a localized construction. We do not specify the GPU implementation. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2008.