Developable Quad Meshes and Contact Element Nets

Ceballos Inza, Victor; Rist, Florian; Wallner, Johannes; Pottmann, Helmut

Developable Quad Meshes and Contact Element Nets

Files

contacts.pdf (11.22 MB)

Embargo End Date

2023-11-25

Type

Preprint

Authors

Ceballos Inza, Victor
Rist, Florian
Wallner, Johannes
Pottmann, Helmut

KAUST Department

Computer Science Program
Computer, Electrical and Mathematical Science and Engineering (CEMSE) Division
Visual Computing Center (VCC)
Applied Mathematics and Computational Science Program

Date

2023-12

Abstract

The property of a surface being developable can be expressed in different equivalent ways, by vanishing Gauss curvature, or by the existence of isometric mappings to planar domains. Computational contributions to this topic range from special parametrizations to discrete-isometric mappings. However, so far a local criterion expressing developability of general quad meshes has been lacking. In this paper, we propose a new and efficient discrete developability criterion that is applied to quad meshes equipped with vertex weights, and which is motivated by a well-known characterization in differential geometry, namely a rank-deficient second fundamental form. We assign contact elements to the faces of meshes and ruling vectors to the edges, which in combination yield a developability condition per face. Using standard optimization procedures, we are able to perform interactive design and developable lofting. The meshes we employ are combinatorial regular quad meshes with isolated singularities but are otherwise not required to follow any special curves on a developable surface. They are thus easily embedded into a design workflow involving standard operations like remeshing, trimming, and merging operations. An important feature is that we can directly derive a watertight, rational bi-quadratic spline surface from our meshes. Remarkably, it occurs as the limit of weighted Doo-Sabin subdivision, which acts in an interpolatory manner on contact elements.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Austrian Science Fund via grants I2978 (SFB-Transregio programme Discretization in geometry and dynamics), and F77 (SFB grant Advanced Computational Design). V. Ceballos Inza and F. Rist were supported by KAUST baseline funding.