Evolution of T-spline level sets for meshing non-uniformly sampled and incomplete data

Given a large set of unorganized point sample data, we propose a new framework for computing a triangular mesh representing an approximating piecewise smooth surface. The data may be non-uniformly distributed, noisy, and may contain holes. This framework is based on the combination of two types of surface representations, triangular meshes and T-spline level sets, which are implicit surfaces defined by refinable spline functions allowing T-junctions. Our method contains three main steps. Firstly, we construct an implicit representation of a smooth (C ² in our case) surface, by using an evolution process of T-spline level sets, such that the implicit surface captures the topology and outline of the object to be reconstructed. The initial mesh with high quality is obtained through the marching triangulation of the implicit surface. Secondly, we project each data point to the initial mesh, and get a scalar displacement field. Detailed features will be captured by the displaced mesh. Finally, we present an additional evolution process, which combines data-driven velocities and feature-preserving bilateral filters, in order to reproduce sharp features. We also show that various shape constraints, such as distance field constraints, range constraints and volume constraints can be naturally added to our framework, which is helpful to obtain a desired reconstruction result, especially when the given data contains noise and inaccuracies.     

Controlled Metamorphosis Between Skeleton‐Driven Animated Polyhedral Meshes of Arbitrary Topologies

Enabling animators to smoothly transform between animated meshes of differing topologies is a long‐standing problem in geometric modelling and computer animation. In this paper, we propose a new hybrid approach built upon the advantages of scalar field‐based models (often called implicit surfaces) which can easily change their topology by changing their defining scalar field. Given two meshes, animated by their rigging‐skeletons, we associate each mesh with its own approximating implicit surface. This implicit surface moves synchronously with the mesh. The shape‐metamorphosis process is performed in several steps: first, we collapse the two meshes to their corresponding approximating implicit surfaces, then we transform between the two implicit surfaces and finally we inverse transition from the resulting metamorphosed implicit surface to the target mesh. The examples presented in this paper demonstrating the results of the proposed technique were implemented using an in‐house plug‐in for Maya?.     

Ptex: Per‐Face Texture Mapping for Production Rendering

Explicit parameterization of subdivision surfaces for texture mapping adds significant cost and complexity to film production. Most parameterization methods currently in use require setup effort, and none are completely general. We propose a new texture mapping method for Catmull‐Clark subdivision surfaces that requires no explicit parameterization. Our method, Ptex, stores a separate texture per quad face of the subdivision control mesh, along with a novel per‐face adjacency map, in a single texture file per surface. Ptex uses the adjacency data to perform seamless anisotropic filtering of multi‐resolution textures across surfaces of arbitrary topology. Just as importantly, Ptex requires no manual setup and scales to models of arbitrary mesh complexity and texture detail. Ptex has been successfully used to texture all of the models in an animated theatrical short and is currently being applied to an entire animated feature. Ptex has eliminated UV assignment from our studio and significantly increased the efficiency of our pipeline.     

用户控制的纹理合成

提出一种基于用户控制的纹理合成算法．该算法适用于任意二维平面和任意拓扑的三维网格．可方便地控制纹理合成时方向和尺度的连续变化．对于任意平面区域需剖分成较均匀的三角网格,以剖分得到的二角形作为基本的合成单元来进行合成．根据用户在此三角网格上指定表示纹理方向和大小的矢量来插值生成矢量场,用以控制合成纹理的变化．该算法可以自然扩展到三维三角网格,以三角面片作为合成单元,合成后直接输出每个顶点的纹理坐标．该算法对二维和三维纹理合成给出了统一实现的框架．实验结果表明,该算法可以在任意目标区域根据用户的交互生成令人满意的纹理合成效果．     

任意拓扑网的细分改进

在改进任意拓扑网构造光滑表面时,初始控制网格确定的情况下,生成的曲面形状惟一确定,最终的物体造型也随之确定,不具有可调性,因而在曲面细分过程中引入了控制参数和摄动。通过引入控制参数,调节一个参数值,使得所得的细分曲面的表达度可控,可以得到一系列的细分曲面。引入摄动是为了改进了空间位置,允许局部地调控约束曲面的形状。最后给出了曲面设计的实例,表明这种算法简单、有效。     

Generalized B-spline subdivision-surface wavelets for geometry compression

We present a new construction of lifted biorthogonal wavelets on surfaces of arbitrary two-manifold topology for compression and multiresolution representation. Our method combines three approaches: subdivision surfaces of arbitrary topology, B-spline wavelets, and the lifting scheme for biorthogonal wavelet construction. The simple building blocks of our wavelet transform are local lifting operations performed on polygonal meshes with subdivision hierarchy. Starting with a coarse, irregular polyhedral base mesh, our transform creates a subdivision hierarchy of meshes converging to a smooth limit surface. At every subdivision level, geometric detail is expanded from wavelet coefficients and added to the surface. We present wavelet constructions for bilinear, bicubic, and biquintic B-spline subdivision. While the bilinear and bicubic constructions perform well in numerical experiments, the biquintic construction turns out to be unstable. For lossless compression, our transform is computed in integer arithmetic, mapping integer coordinates of control points to integer wavelet coefficients. Our approach provides a highly efficient and progressive representation for complex geometries of arbitrary topology.     

Tetrahedral Embedded Boundary Methods for Accurate and Flexible Adaptive Fluids

When simulating fluids, tetrahedral methods provide flexibility and ease of adaptivity that Cartesian grids find difficult to match. However, this approach has so far been limited by two conflicting requirements. First, accurate simulation requires quality Delaunay meshes and the use of circumcentric pressures. Second, meshes must align with potentially complex moving surfaces and boundaries, necessitating continuous remeshing. Unfortunately, sacrificing mesh quality in favour of speed yields inaccurate velocities and simulation artifacts. We describe how to eliminate the boundary‐matching constraint by adapting recent embedded boundary techniques to tetrahedra, so that neither air nor solid boundaries need to align with mesh geometry. This enables the use of high quality, arbitrarily graded, non‐conforming Delaunay meshes, which are simpler and faster to generate. Temporal coherence can also be exploited by reusing meshes over adjacent timesteps to further reduce meshing costs. Lastly, our free surface boundary condition eliminates the spurious currents that previous methods exhibited for slow or static scenarios. We provide several examples demonstrating that our efficient tetrahedral embedded boundary method can substantially increase the flexibility and accuracy of adaptive Eulerian fluid simulation.     

在任意拓扑三角形网格上的光滑样条曲面

介绍了一种在控制三角形网格上创建光滑样条曲面的算法,该控制网格能够刻画具有或没有边界的任意自由曲面.生成的曲面有一个4次参数多项式表示并且被表示成一个切平面连续的三角形Bézier片网.曲面对网格的逼近程度受到一个混合比控制,当混合比为0时,产生的曲面插值网格.该算法是一种局部方法,简单且效率高,适合于外形设计.     

Automated construction of low-resolution, texture-mapped, class-optimal meshes

In this paper, we present a framework for the groupwise processing of a set of meshes in dense correspondence. Such sets arise when modeling 3D shape variation or tracking surface motion over time. We extend a number of mesh processing tools to operate in a groupwise manner. Specifically, we present a geodesic-based surface flattening and spectral clustering algorithm which estimates a single class-optimal flattening. We also show how to modify an iterative edge collapse algorithm to perform groupwise simplification while retaining the correspondence of the data. Finally, we show how to compute class-optimal texture coordinates for the simplified meshes. We present alternative algorithms for topologically symmetric data which yield a symmetric flattening and low-resolution mesh topology. We present flattening, simplification, and texture mapping results on three different data sets and show that our approach allows the construction of low-resolution 3D morphable models.     

Interpolation by geometric algorithm

We present a novel geometric algorithm to construct a smooth surface that interpolates a triangular or a quadrilateral mesh of arbitrary topological type formed by n vertices. Although our method can be applied to B-spline surfaces and subdivision surfaces of all kinds, we illustrate our algorithm focusing on Loop subdivision surfaces as most of the meshes are in triangular form. We start our algorithm by assuming that the given triangular mesh is a control net of a Loop subdivision surface. The control points are iteratively updated globally by a simple local point-surface distance computation and an offsetting procedure without solving a linear system. The complexity of our algorithm is O(mn) where n is the number of vertices and m is the number of iterations. The number of iterations m depends on the fineness of the mesh and accuracy required.     

Carving for topology simplification of polygonal meshes

The topological complexity of polygonal meshes has a large impact on the performance of various geometric processing algorithms, such as rendering and collision detection algorithms. Several approaches for simplifying topology have been discussed in the literature. These methods operate locally on models, which makes their effect on the topology hard to predict and analyze. Most existing methods tend to exhibit several disturbing artifacts, such as shrinking of the input and splitting of its components. We propose a novel top-down approach for topology simplification that avoids most problems that are common in existing methods. We start with a simple, genus-zero mesh that bounds the input and gradually introduce topologic features by a series of carving operations. This process yields a multiresolution stream of meshes with increasing topologic level of detail. We further present a carving algorithm that is based on constrained Delaunay tetrahedralization. The algorithm first constructs the tetrahedral mesh of the complement of the input with respect to its convex hull. It then proceeds to eliminate tetrahedra in a prioritized manner. We present quality results for two families of meshes that are difficult to simplify by all existing methods known to us: topologically complex meshes and highly clustered meshes.     

ISA and IBFVS: image space-based visualization of flow on surfaces

We present a side-by-side analysis of two recent image space approaches for the visualization of vector fields on surfaces. The two methods, image space advection (ISA) and image-based flow visualization for curved surfaces (IBFVS) generate dense representations of time-dependent vector fields with high spatio-temporal correlation. While the 3D vector fields are associated with arbitrary surfaces represented by triangular meshes, the generation and advection of texture properties is confined to image space. Fast frame rates are achieved by exploiting frame-to-frame coherency and graphics hardware. In our comparison of ISA and IBFVS, we point out the strengths and weaknesses of each approach and give recommendations as to when and where they are best applied.     

5–6–7 Meshes: Remeshing and analysis

We introduce a new type of meshes called 5–6–7 meshes. For many mesh processing tasks, low- or high-valence vertices are undesirable. At the same time, it is not always possible to achieve complete vertex valence regularity, i.e. to only have valence-6 vertices. A 5–6–7 mesh is a closed triangle mesh where each vertex has valence 5, 6, or 7. An intriguing question is whether it is always possible to convert an arbitrary mesh into a 5–6–7 mesh. In this paper, we answer the question in the positive. We present a 5–6–7 remeshing algorithm which converts a closed triangle mesh with arbitrary genus into a 5–6–7 mesh which (a) closely approximates the original mesh geometrically, e.g. in terms of feature preservation and (b) has a comparable vertex count as the original mesh. We demonstrate the results of our remeshing algorithm on meshes with sharp features and different topology and complexity.     

Feature-preserving adaptive mesh generation for molecular shape modeling and simulation

We describe a chain of algorithms for molecular surface and volumetric mesh generation. We take as inputs the centers and radii of all atoms of a molecule and the toolchain outputs both triangular and tetrahedral meshes that can be used for molecular shape modeling and simulation. Experiments on a number of molecules are demonstrated, showing that our methods possess several desirable properties: feature-preservation, local adaptivity, high quality, and smoothness (for surface meshes). We also demonstrate an example of molecular simulation using the finite element method and the meshes generated by our method. The approaches presented and their implementations are also applicable to other types of inputs such as 3D scalar volumes and triangular surface meshes with low quality, and hence can be used for generation/improvement of meshes in a broad range of applications.     

Implicit meshes for surface reconstruction

Deformable 3D models can be represented either as traditional explicit surfaces, such as triangulated meshes, or as implicit surfaces. Explicit surfaces are widely accepted because they are simple to deform and render, but fitting them involves minimizing a nondifferentiable distance function. By contrast, implicit surfaces allow fitting by minimizing a differentiate algebraic distance, but are harder to meaningfully deform and render. Here, we propose a method that combines the strength of both approaches. It relies on a technique that can turn a completely arbitrary triangulated mesh, such as one taken from the Web, into an implicit surface that closely approximates it and can deform in tandem with it. This allows both automated algorithms to take advantage of the attractive properties of implicit surfaces for fitting purposes and people to use standard deformation tools they feel comfortable for interaction and animation purposes. We demonstrate the applicability of our technique to modeling the human upper-body, including face, neck, shoulders, and ears, from noisy stereo and silhouette data.     

Fast Mesh Reconstruction from Single View Based on GCN and Topology Modification

3D reconstruction based on single view aims to reconstruct the entire 3D shape of an object from one perspective. When existing methods reconstruct the mesh surface of complex objects, the surface details are difficult to predict and the reconstruction visual effect is poor because the mesh representation is not easily integrated into the deep learning framework; the 3D topology is easily limited by predefined templates and inflexible, and unnecessary mesh self-intersections and connections will be generated when reconstructing complex topology, thus destroying the surface details; the training of the reconstruction network is limited by the large amount of information attached to the mesh vertices, and the training time of the reconstructed network is too long. In this paper, we propose a method for fast mesh reconstruction from single view based on Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) and topology modification. We use GCN to ensure the generation of high-quality mesh surfaces and use topology modification to improve the flexibility of the topology. Meanwhile, a feature fusion method is proposed to make full use of the features of each stage of the image hierarchically. We use 3D open dataset ShapeNet to train our network and add a new weight parameter to speed up the training process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can not only reconstruct object meshes on complex topological surfaces, but also has better qualitative and quantitative results.     

A local tangential lifting differential method for triangular meshes

In this note we present a local tangential lifting (LTL) algorithm to compute differential quantities for triangular meshes obtained from regular surfaces. First, we introduce a new notation of the local tangential polygon and lift functions and vector fields on a triangular mesh to the local tangential polygon. Then we use the centroid weights proposed by Chen and Wu [4] to define the discrete gradient of a function on a triangular mesh. We also use our new method to define the discrete Laplacian operator acting on functions on triangular meshes. Higher order differential operators can also be computed successively. Our approach is conceptually simple and easy to compute. Indeed, our LTL method also provides a unified algorithm to estimate the shape operator and curvatures of a triangular mesh and derivatives of functions and vector fields. We also compare three different methods : our method, the least square method and Akima’s method to compute the gradients of functions.     

A Shrink Wrapping Approach to Remeshing Polygonal Surfaces

Due to their simplicity and flexibility, polygonal meshes are about to become the standard representation for surface geometry in computer graphics applications. Some algorithms in the context of multiresolution representation and modeling can be performed much more efficiently and robustly if the underlying surface tesselations have the special subdivision connectivity. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm for converting a given unstructured triangle mesh into one having subdivision connectivity. The basic idea is to simulate the shrink wrapping process by adapting the deformable surface technique known from image processing. The resulting algorithm generates subdivision connectivity meshes whose base meshes only have a very small number of triangles. The iterative optimization process that distributes the mesh vertices over the given surface geometry guarantees low local distortion of the triangular faces. We show several examples and applications including the progressive transmission of subdivision surfaces.     

A local tangential lifting differential method for triangular meshes

In this note we present a local tangential lifting (LTL) algorithm to compute differential quantities for triangular meshes obtained from regular surfaces. First, we introduce a new notation of the local tangential polygon and lift functions and vector fields on a triangular mesh to the local tangential polygon. Then we use the centroid weights proposed by Chen and Wu [4] to define the discrete gradient of a function on a triangular mesh. We also use our new method to define the discrete Laplacian operator acting on functions on triangular meshes. Higher order differential operators can also be computed successively. Our approach is conceptually simple and easy to compute. Indeed, our LTL method also provides a unified algorithm to estimate the shape operator and curvatures of a triangular mesh and derivatives of functions and vector fields. We also compare three different methods : our method, the least square method and Akima’s method to compute the gradients of functions.