Finding Starting Points for Tracing Surface Intersections

1 Introduction Finding out proper starting points for all the intersection curves between two surfaces is a key process in numerical tracing methods for surface-surface intersection (SSI) problems. A number of methods 1] are introduced to calculate the starting points. Cugini et al. 2] introduced the concept of shrinking bounding boxes to calculate starting points. This method is simple and in some cases effective, but it may miss some intersection components. Muellenheim 3] presented an…

Finding Starting Points for Tracing Surface Intersections

To find starting points for all the intersection curves, one of the surfaces is subdivided into some small surface patches. Based on a correlative algorithm of computing the minimum distance of two surfaces, the intersections of every patch with another surface are detected, and starting points are calculated by dichotomy. This algorithm shows superior efficiency in the computational complexity and number of iterations needed. It can be used to determine exact starting points on all possible solution curves between any kinds of parametric sculptured surfaces.