Smooth quasi-developable surfaces bounded by smooth curves

Computing a quasi-developable strip surface bounded by design curves finds wide industrial applications. Existing methods compute discrete surfaces composed of developable lines connecting sampling points on input curves which are not adequate for generating smooth quasi-developable surfaces. We propose the first method which is capable of exploring the full solution space of continuous input curves to compute a smooth quasi-developable ruled surface with as large developability as possible. The resulting surface is exactly bounded by the input smooth curves and is guaranteed to have no self-intersections. The main contribution is a variational approach to compute a continuous mapping of parameters of input curves by minimizing a function evaluating surface developability. Moreover, we also present an algorithm to represent a resulting surface as a B-spline surface when input curves are B-spline curves.Comment: 18 page

Stripification of free-form surfaces with global error bounds for developable approximation

Developable surfaces have many desired properties in the manufacturing process. Since most existing CAD systems utilize tensor-product parametric surfaces including B-splines as design primitives, there is a great demand in industry to convert a general free-form parametric surface within a prescribed global error bound into developable patches. In this paper, we propose a practical and efficient solution to approximate a rectangular parametric surface with a small set of C 0 -joint developable strips. The key contribution of the proposed algorithm is that, several optimization problems are elegantly solved in a sequence that offers a controllable global error bound on the developable surface approximation. Experimental results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness and stability of the proposed algorithm