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Piecewise ruled approximation for freeform mesh surfaces

Pan, Yiling, Xu, Zhixin, Wang, Bin and Deng, Bailin ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0158-7670 2025. Piecewise ruled approximation for freeform mesh surfaces. ACM Transactions on Graphics 44 (4) 10.1145/3730866

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Abstract

A ruled surface is a shape swept out by moving a line in 3D space. Due to their simple geometric forms, ruled surfaces have applications in various domains such as architecture and engineering. In the past, various approaches have been proposed to approximate a target shape using developable surfaces, which are special ruled surfaces with zero Gaussian curvature. However, methods for shape approximation using general ruled surfaces remain limited and often require the target shape to be either represented as parametric surfaces or have non-positive Gaussian curvature. In this paper, we propose a method to compute a piecewise ruled surface that approximates an arbitrary freeform mesh surface. We first use a group-sparsity formulation to optimize the given mesh shape into an approximately piecewise ruled form, in conjunction with a tangent vector field that indicates the ruling directions. Afterward, we utilize the optimization result to extract seams that separate smooth families of rulings, and use the seams to construct the initial rulings. Finally, we further optimize the positions and orientations of the rulings to improve the alignment with the input target shape. We apply our method to a variety of freeform shapes with different topologies and complexity, demonstrating its effectiveness in approximating arbitrary shapes.

Item Type: Article
Status: In Press
Schools: Schools > Computer Science & Informatics
Subjects: Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science
Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA76 Computer software
Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery
ISSN: 0730-0301
Date of First Compliant Deposit: 7 May 2025
Date of Acceptance: 3 May 2025
Last Modified: 16 Jun 2025 08:52
URI: https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/178124

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