Multiple aligned characteristic curves for surface fairing

Abstract

Characteristic curves like isophotes, reflection lines and reflection circles are well-established concepts which have been used for automatic fairing of both parametric and piecewise linear surfaces. However, the result of the fairing strongly depends on the choice of a particular family of characteristic curves: isophotes or reflection lines may look perfect for a certain orientation of viewing and projection direction, but still have imperfections for other directions. Therefore, fairing methods are necessary which consider multiplefamilies of characteristic curves. To achieve this, we first introduce a new way of controlling characteristic curves directly on the surface. Based on this, we introduce a fairing scheme which incorporates several families of characteristic curves simultaneously. We confirm effectiveness of our method for a number of test data sets. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2008.