Reconstruction of intersecting curved solids from 2D orthographic views

This paper presents a new approach to reconstruct curved solids composed of elementary volumes intersecting with one another from three-view engineering drawings. Intersection curves arising from two intersecting curved surfaces are mostly higher order spatial curves, which cannot be described exactly by 2D orthographic projections and normally represented as smooth curves passing through several key points or even simplified as arcs or lines. Approximated sketches of higher order intersection curves in 2D views result in the invalidation of existing methods that need the exact projection information as input. Based on some heuristic hints, our method is able to recover the complete and correct half-profiles of the intersecting elementary volumes using the least traces left by them, which ensure the correctness of solution solids constructed finally. Several examples are provided to show the validation of the described method.