Surface shape and quality have a visible impact on new product design and industrial competitiveness. This research addresses the fundamental challenge of smoothly joining multiple surface pieces without shape defects. The new approach separates shape design from surface representation and thereby gives more freedom to the designer while still delivering a standard representation required by industrial design cycles.
In the new approach, shape is locally defined by surface fragments, called guide surfaces. Guide surfaces need only obey few constraints. In a second step, the derivative jets of each guide surface are sampled and converted to curvature continuous parametric surfaces in standard representation. The research characterizes classes of guide surfaces, devises strategies for automatic guide surface construction and formalizes and analyzes the properties of jet sampling strategies in practical implementations.
