Procedural Representation Method of Blending Surface

Abstract

A solid model representing a product requires filleting or blending, which rounds a specified edge or vertex, in order to make a production model for manufacturing purpose such as mould die model. As a surface representation, current major solid modeling CAD systems use a tensor product surface such as B-spline or NURBS surface. Representing blend surfaces using tensor product surfaces, however, causes several problems in the case such as, blends for meandering shapes or blends degenerate at one side of a surface. We propose a new blend algorithm which makes blend process robust. In this report, we show a procedural blend surface representation that intersections of offset surfaces are represented in procedural curves and basic blend surfaces values, point positions and differentials, are interrogated through that curves. Several examples are shown to verify that procedural blend surfaces have higher quality compared to tensor product surfaces.