On the dimension of spline spaces on planar T-meshes

We analyze the space of bivariate functions that are piecewise polynomial of bi-degree \textless{}= (m, m') and of smoothness r along the interior edges of a planar T-mesh. We give new combinatorial lower and upper bounds for the dimension of this space by exploiting homological techniques. We relate this dimension to the weight of the maximal interior segments of the T-mesh, defined for an ordering of these maximal interior segments. We show that the lower and upper bounds coincide, for high enough degrees or for hierarchical T-meshes which are enough regular. We give a rule of subdivision to construct hierarchical T-meshes for which these lower and upper bounds coincide. Finally, we illustrate these results by analyzing spline spaces of small degrees and smoothness

Subdivision Directional Fields

We present a novel linear subdivision scheme for face-based tangent directional fields on triangle meshes. Our subdivision scheme is based on a novel coordinate-free representation of directional fields as halfedge-based scalar quantities, bridging the finite-element representation with discrete exterior calculus. By commuting with differential operators, our subdivision is structure-preserving: it reproduces curl-free fields precisely, and reproduces divergence-free fields in the weak sense. Moreover, our subdivision scheme directly extends to directional fields with several vectors per face by working on the branched covering space. Finally, we demonstrate how our scheme can be applied to directional-field design, advection, and robust earth mover's distance computation, for efficient and robust computation

Linear Complexity Hexahedral Mesh Generation

We show that any polyhedron forming a topological ball with an even number of quadrilateral sides can be partitioned into O(n) topological cubes, meeting face to face. The result generalizes to non-simply-connected polyhedra satisfying an additional bipartiteness condition. The same techniques can also be used to reduce the geometric version of the hexahedral mesh generation problem to a finite case analysis amenable to machine solution.Comment: 12 pages, 17 figures. A preliminary version of this paper appeared at the 12th ACM Symp. on Computational Geometry. This is the final version, and will appear in a special issue of Computational Geometry: Theory and Applications for papers from SCG '9

QuickCSG: Fast Arbitrary Boolean Combinations of N Solids

QuickCSG computes the result for general N-polyhedron boolean expressions without an intermediate tree of solids. We propose a vertex-centric view of the problem, which simplifies the identification of final geometric contributions, and facilitates its spatial decomposition. The problem is then cast in a single KD-tree exploration, geared toward the result by early pruning of any region of space not contributing to the final surface. We assume strong regularity properties on the input meshes and that they are in general position. This simplifying assumption, in combination with our vertex-centric approach, improves the speed of the approach. Complemented with a task-stealing parallelization, the algorithm achieves breakthrough performance, one to two orders of magnitude speedups with respect to state-of-the-art CPU algorithms, on boolean operations over two to dozens of polyhedra. The algorithm also outperforms GPU implementations with approximate discretizations, while producing an output without redundant facets. Despite the restrictive assumptions on the input, we show the usefulness of QuickCSG for applications with large CSG problems and strong temporal constraints, e.g. modeling for 3D printers, reconstruction from visual hulls and collision detection