Approximate T-spline surface skinning

• Main Authors: Yang, Xunnian., Zheng, Jianmin.
• Other Authors: School of Computer Engineering
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: 2013
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Computer science and engineering
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/84503; http://hdl.handle.net/10220/12762
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

This paper considers the problem of constructing a smooth surface to fit rows of data points. A special class of TT-spline surfaces is examined, which is characterized to have a global knot vector in one parameter direction and individual knot vectors from row to row in the other parameter direction. These TT-spline surfaces are suitable for lofted surface interpolation or approximation. A skinning algorithm using these TT-spline surfaces is proposed, which does not require the knot compatibility of sectional curves. The algorithm consists of three main steps: generating sectional curves by interpolating data points of each row by a BB-spline curve; computing the control curves of a skinning surface that interpolates the sectional curves; and approximating each control curve by a BB-spline curve with fewer knots, which results in a TT-spline surface. Compared with conventional BB-spline surface skinning, the proposed TT-spline surface skinning has two advantages. First, the sectional curves and the control curves of a TT-spline surface can be constructed independently. Second, the generated TT-spline skinning surface usually has much fewer control points than a lofted BB-spline surface that fits the data points with the same error bound. Experimental examples have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.