Generalized Bézier volumes over simple convex polyhedra

Abstract

In recent years, there has been growing interest in the representation of volumes within the field of geometric modeling (GM). While polygonal patches for surface modeling have been extensively studied, there has been little focus on the representation of polyhedral volumes. Inspired by the polygonal representation of the Generalized Bézier (GB) patch proposed by Várady et al. (2016), this paper introduces a novel method for polyhedral volumetric modeling called the Generalized Bézier (GB) volume.GB volumes are defined over simple convex polyhedra using generalized barycentric coordinates (GBCs), with the control nets which are a direct generalization of those of tensor-product Bézier volumes. GB volumes can be smoothly connected to adjacent tensor-product Bézier or GB volumes with G1 or G2 continuity. Besides, when the parametric polyhedron becomes a prism, the GB volume also degenerates into a tensor-product form. We provide some practical examples to demonstrate the advantages of GB volumes. Suggestions for future work are also discussed.