Fourth order PDE blends

Abstract

It has been reported a fourth order partial differential equation is effective in solving surface blending problems. In this paper, we present a new approximate solution to the fourth order partial differential equation and apply it to a number of surface blending tasks. The approximate solution consists of two parts: a blended part of boundary functions is used to accurately satisfy the original boundary conditions that define the blending surfaces; and a bivariate polynomial with zeroed boundary conditions, which is used to minimize the error of the fourth order partial differential equation. Using the developed method, a number of examples are investigated to demonstrate the applications of the proposed method in surface blending.