Fusion of disconnected mesh components with branching shapes

Branching structure is a common feature of many natural objects. Given some mesh components with a branching shape missing, this paper presents a novel approach to fuse the mesh components: connectivity graph of the branching shape is constructed to seamlessly connect the boundaries of given components; then, natural geometry is imposed on the connectivity graph exploiting the information of given boundaries. We present a method to construct a branching connectivity graph to connect arbitrary number of given boundaries. Also, a method to generate natural geometry of the connectivity graph that smoothly fuses the boundaries of mesh components is exploited. Some examples are given to demonstrate that our new scheme can be used in a couple of applications, such as fast tree trunk modeling, mesh composition and shell generation.