GC 1 multisided Bézier surfaces

This paper presents a new method for generating a tangent-plane continuous (GC¹) multisided surface with an arbitrary number of sides. The method generates piecewise biquintic tensor product Bézier patches which join each other with G¹-continuity and which interpolate the given vector-valued first order cross-derivative functions along the boundary curves. The problem of the twist-compatibility of the surface patches at the center points is solved through the construction of normal-curvature continuous starlines and by the way the twists of surface patches are generated. This avoids the inter-relationship among the starlines and the twists of surface patches at the center points. The generation of the center points and the starlines has many degrees of freedom which can be used to modify and improve the quality of the resulting surface patches. The method can be used in various geometric modeling applications such as filling n-sided holes, smoothing vertices of polyhedral solids, blending multiple surfaces, and modeling surface over irregular polyhedral line and curve meshes.