Design of 2D Time-Varying Vector Fields

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Design of 2D time-varying vector fields

pre-printDesign of time-varying vector fields, i.e., vector fields that can change over time, has a wide variety of important applications in computer graphics. Existing vector field design techniques do not address time-varying vector fields. In this paper, we present a framework for the design of time-varying vector fields, both for planar domains as well as manifold surfaces. Our system supports the creation and modification of various time-varying vector fields with desired spatial and temporal characteristics through several design metaphors, including streamlines, pathlines, singularity paths, and bifurcations. These design metaphors are integrated into an element-based design to generate the time-varying vector fields via a sequence of basis field summations or spatial constrained optimizations at the sampled times. The key-frame design and field deformation are also introduced to support other user design scenarios. Accordingly, a spatial-temporal constrained optimization and the time-varying transformation are employed to generate the desired fields for these two design scenarios, respectively. We apply the time-varying vector fields generated using our design system to a number of important computer graphics applications that require controllable dynamic effects, such as evolving surface appearance, dynamic scene design, steerable crowd movement, and painterly animation. Many of these are difficult or impossible to achieve via prior simulation-based methods. In these applications, the time-varying vector fields have been applied as either orientation fields or advection fields to control the instantaneous appearance or evolving trajectories of the dynamic effects

Surface parameterization over regular domains

Surface parameterization has been widely studied and it has been playing a critical role in many geometric processing tasks in graphics, computer-aided design, visualization, vision, physical simulation and etc. Regular domains, such as polycubes, are favored due to their structural regularity and geometric simplicity. This thesis focuses on studying the surface parameterization over regular domains, i.e. polycubes, and develops effective computation algorithms. Firstly, the motivation for surface parameterization and polycube mapping is introduced. Secondly, we briefly review existing surface parameterization techniques, especially for extensively studied parameterization algorithms for topological disk surfaces and parameterizations over regular domains for closed surfaces. Then we propose a polycube parameterization algorithm for closed surfaces with general topology. We develop an efficient optimization framework to minimize the angle and area distortion of the mapping. Its applications on surface meshing, inter-shape morphing and volumetric polycube mapping are also discussed

Geometric modeling and optimization over regular domains for graphics and visual computing

The effective construction of parametric representation of complicated geometric objects can facilitate many design, analysis, and simulation tasks in Computer-Aided Design (CAD), Computer-Aided Manufacturing (CAM), and Computer-Aided Engineering (CAE). Given a 3D shape, the procedure of finding such a parametric representation upon a canonical domain is called geometric parameterization. Regular geometric regions, such as polycubes and spheres, are desirable domains for parameterization. Parametric representations defined upon regular geometric domains have many desirable mathematical properties and can facilitate or simplify various surface/solid modeling and processing computation. This dissertation studies the construction of parameterization on regular geometric domains and explores their applications in shape modeling and computer-aided design. Specifically, we studies (1) the surface parameterization on the spherical domain for closed genus-zero surfaces; (2) the surface parameterization on the polycube domain for general closed surfaces; and (3) the volumetric parameterization for 3D-manifolds embedded in 3D Euclidean space. We propose novel computational models to solve these geometric problems. Our computational models reduce to nonlinear optimizations with various geometric constraints. Hence, we also need to explore effective optimization algorithms. The main contributions of this dissertation are three-folded. (1) We developed an effective progressive spherical parameterization algorithm, with an efficient nonlinear optimization scheme subject to the spherical constraint. Compared with the state-of-the-art spherical mapping algorithms, our algorithm demonstrates the advantages of great efficiency, lower distortion, and guaranteed bijectiveness, and we show its applications in spherical harmonic decomposition and shape analysis. (2) We propose a first topology-preserving polycube domain optimization algorithm that simultaneously optimizes polycube domain together with the parameterization to balance the mapping distortion and domain simplicity. We develop effective nonlinear geometric optimization algorithms dealing with variables with and without derivatives. This polycube parameterization algorithm can benefit the regular quadrilateral mesh generation and cross-surface parameterization. (3) We develop a novel quaternion-based optimization framework for 3D frame field construction and volumetric parameterization computation. We demonstrate our constructed 3D frame field has better smoothness, compared with state-of-the-art algorithms, and is effective in guiding low-distortion volumetric parameterization and high-quality hexahedral mesh generation