NURBS surface deformation design for complex products by transplanting the surface feature

This article addresses the problem of NURBS surface deformation design using surface feature transplantation. To represent the semantic surface feature, a new surface feature representation called normal feature membrane is proposed. In the proposed method, the base surfaces of the source surface with the feature that the designer is highly interested in and the target surface to be deformed are first constructed. This is followed by extracting the normal feature membrane of the source surface. The deformation design is then realized by transplanting the extracted normal feature membrane of the source surface to the base surface of the target surface through four main operations, which are normal feature membrane preprocessing, normal feature membrane transplanting, surface fairing, and boundary feature decaying, respectively. The proposed method provides an easy copy–paste operation of the semantic surface feature for surface deformation of complex product. The examples of the surface feature transplantation for the surface design of automobile bodies are given to verify the validity and feasibility of the proposed method.