Semi-Sharp Subdivision Shading

Subdivision is a method for generating a limit surface from a coarse mesh by recursively dividing its faces into several smaller faces. This process leads to smooth surfaces, but often suffers from shading artifacts near extraordinary points due to the lower quality of the normal field there. The idea of subdivision shading is to apply the same subdivision rules that are used to subdivide geometry to also subdivide the normals associated with mesh vertices. This leads to smoother normal fields, which in turn removes the shading artifacts. However, the original subdivision shading method does not support sharp and semi-sharp creases, which are important ingredients in subdivision surface modelling. We present two approaches to extending subdivision shading to work also on models with (semi-)sharp creases

Subdivision surface fitting to a dense mesh using ridges and umbilics

Fitting a sparse surface to approximate vast dense data is of interest for many applications: reverse engineering, recognition and compression, etc. The present work provides an approach to fit a Loop subdivision surface to a dense triangular mesh of arbitrary topology, whilst preserving and aligning the original features. The natural ridge-joined connectivity of umbilics and ridge-crossings is used as the connectivity of the control mesh for subdivision, so that the edges follow salient features on the surface. Furthermore, the chosen features and connectivity characterise the overall shape of the original mesh, since ridges capture extreme principal curvatures and ridges start and end at umbilics. A metric of Hausdorff distance including curvature vectors is proposed and implemented in a distance transform algorithm to construct the connectivity. Ridge-colour matching is introduced as a criterion for edge flipping to improve feature alignment. Several examples are provided to demonstrate the feature-preserving capability of the proposed approach

Piecewise Rational Manifold Surfaces with Sharp Features

We present a construction of a piecewise rational free-form surface of arbitrary topological genus which may contain sharp features: creases, corners or cusps. The surface is automatically generated from a given closed triangular mesh. Some of the edges are tagged as sharp ones, defining the features on the surface. The surface is C s smooth, for an arbitrary value of s, except for the sharp features defined by the user. Our method is based on the manifold construction and follows the blending approach

Fitting sharp features with loop subdivision surfaces

Various methods have been proposed for fitting subdivision surfaces to different forms of shape data (e.g., dense meshes or point clouds), but none of these methods effectively deals with shapes with sharp features, that is, creases, darts and corners. We present an effective method for fitting a Loop subdivision surface to a dense triangle mesh with sharp features. Our contribution is a new exact evaluation scheme for the Loop subdivision with all types of sharp features, which enables us to compute a fitting Loop subdivision surface for shapes with sharp features in an optimization framework. With an initial control mesh obtained from simplifying the input dense mesh using QEM, our fitting algorithm employs an iterative method to solve a nonlinear least squares problem based on the squared distances from the input mesh vertices to the fitting subdivision surface. This optimization framework depends critically on the ability to express these distances as quadratic functions of control mesh vertices using our exact evaluation scheme near sharp features. Experimental results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the method. © 2008 The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.link_to_subscribed_fulltex

Fitting sharp features with loop subdivision surfaces

Various methods have been proposed for fitting subdivision surfaces to different forms of shape data (e.g., dense meshes or point clouds), but none of these methods effectively deals with shapes with sharp features, that is, creases, darts and corners. We present an effective method for fitting a Loop subdivision surface to a dense triangle mesh with sharp features. Our contribution is a new exact evaluation scheme for the Loop subdivision with all types of sharp features, which enables us to compute a fitting Loop subdivision surface for shapes with sharp features in an optimization framework. With an initial control mesh obtained from simplifying the input dense mesh using QEM, our fitting algorithm employs an iterative method to solve a nonlinear least squares problem based on the squared distances from the input mesh vertices to the fitting subdivision surface. This optimization framework depends critically on the ability to express these distances as quadratic functions of control mesh vertices using our exact evaluation scheme near sharp features. Experimental results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the method. © 2008 The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.link_to_subscribed_fulltex