Quad Mesh Research Articles

Two-Colour Topology Finding of Quad-Mesh Patterns

The patterns of many structural systems must fulfil a property of two-colourability to partition their elements into two groups. Such examples include top versus bottom layers of continuous beams in elastic gridshells, corrugated versus non-corrugated directions in corrugated shells or warp versus weft threads in woven structures. Complying with such constraints does not depend on the geometry but on the topology of the structure, and, more specifically, on its singularities. This paper presents a search strategy to obtain patterns that fulfil this topological requirement, which represent only a fraction of the general design space. Based on an algebra for the exploration of the topology of quad meshes, including a grammar and a distance, a topology-finding algorithm is proposed to find the closest two-colour quad-mesh patterns from an input quad-mesh pattern. This approach is expressed as the projection to the two-colourable subspace of the design space. The distance underlying the definition of the projection measures the similarity between designs as the minimum number of topological grammar rules to apply to modify one design into another. A design application illustrates how two-colour topology finding can complement workflows for the exploration of structural patterns with singularities informed by the system’s topological requirements.

English

We present a method for the generation of a pure quad mesh approximating a discrete manifold of arbitrary topology that preserves the patch layout characterizing the intrinsic object structure. A three-step procedure constitutes the core of our approach which first extracts the patch layout of the object by a topological partitioning of the digital shape, then computes the minimal surface given by the boundaries of the patch layout (basic quad layout) and then evolves it towards the object boundaries. The Lagrangian evolution of the initial surface (basic quad layout) in the direction of the gradient of the signed distance function is smoothed by a mean curvature term. The direct control over the global quality of the generated quad mesh is provided by two types of tangential redistributions: area-based, to equally distribute the size of the quads, and angle-based, to preserve quad corner angles. Experimental results showed that the proposed method generates pure quad meshes of arbitrary topology objects, composed of well-shaped evenly distributed elements with few extraordinary vertices.

Optimization design method for noise barrier tunnel junction on merging lanes using quad meshes

ABSTRACT Noise barrier tunnels (NBTs) are road facilities installed to reduce road traffic noise. Although building information modeling (BIM) has been widely used in civil engineering, alignment problems must first be addressed for BIM to be applied in transportation infrastructure; this is because unlike buildings, roads are linear. The array of tunnel frames based on the centerlines of individual roads cause the discontinuity of components at junctions of two NBTs. This leads to structural instabilities and poor airtightness, which in turn cause vulnerabilities such as noise and water leakage. To address these issues, this study proposes an optimization design method for NBT junctions using quad meshes. We created a Y-branch topology of NBTs using quad meshes, performed data arrangement using mesh segmentation and mesh reorder, and used the results to optimize the design via performance analysis. During mesh segmentation and mesh reorder, an interface in which the user directly enters curves to improve the efficiency of the algorithm was also developed. In addition, a case study of a main road with eight lanes that merged with a sub road with one lane was conducted, data arrangement was performed successfully, and a BIM-compliant model that used various geometric data was generated through optimization.

Quad-mesh based isometric mappings and developable surfaces

We discretize isometric mappings between surfaces as correspondences between checkerboard patterns derived from quad meshes. This method captures the degrees of freedom inherent in smooth isometries and enables a natural definition of discrete developable surfaces. This definition, which is remarkably simple, leads to a class of discrete developables which is much more flexible in applications than previous concepts of discrete developables. In this paper, we employ optimization to efficiently compute isometric mappings, conformal mappings and isometric bending of surfaces. We perform geometric modeling of developables, including cutting, gluing and folding. The discrete mappings presented here have applications in both theory and practice: We propose a theory of curvatures derived from a discrete Gauss map as well as a construction of watertight CAD models consisting of developable spline surfaces.

A bending-active twisted-arch plywood structure: computational design and fabrication of the FlexMaps Pavilion

Bending-active structures are able to efficiently produce complex curved shapes from flat panels. The desired deformation of the panels derives from the proper selection of their elastic properties. Optimized panels, called FlexMaps, are designed such that, once they are bent and assembled, the resulting static equilibrium configuration matches a desired input 3D shape. The FlexMaps elastic properties are controlled by locally varying spiraling geometric mesostructures, which are optimized in size and shape to match specific bending requests, namely the global curvature of the target shape. The design pipeline starts from a quad mesh representing the input 3D shape, which defines the edge size and the total amount of spirals: every quad will embed one spiral. Then, an optimization algorithm tunes the geometry of the spirals by using a simplified pre-computed rod model. This rod model is derived from a non-linear regression algorithm which approximates the non-linear behavior of solid FEM spiral models subject to hundreds of load combinations. This innovative pipeline has been applied to the project of a lightweight plywood pavilion named FlexMaps Pavilion, which is a single-layer piecewise twisted arch that fits a bounding box of 3.90x3.96x3.25 meters. This case study serves to test the applicability of this methodology at the architectural scale. The structure is validated via FE analyses and the fabrication of the full scale prototype.

Cost Minimizing Local Anisotropic Quad Mesh Refinement

AbstractQuad meshes as a surface representation have many conceptual advantages over triangle meshes. Their edges can naturally be aligned to principal curvatures of the underlying surface and they have the flexibility to create strongly anisotropic cells without causing excessively small inner angles. While in recent years a lot of progress has been made towards generating high quality uniform quad meshes for arbitrary shapes, their adaptive and anisotropic refinement remains difficult since a single edge split might propagate across the entire surface in order to maintain consistency. In this paper we present a novel refinement technique which finds the optimal trade‐off between number of resulting elements and inserted singularities according to a user prescribed weighting. Our algorithm takes as input a quad mesh with those edges tagged that are prescribed to be refined. It then formulates a binary optimization problem that minimizes the number of additional edges which need to be split in order to maintain consistency. Valence 3 and 5 singularities have to be introduced in the transition region between refined and unrefined regions of the mesh. The optimization hence computes the optimal trade‐off and places singularities strategically in order to minimize the number of consistency splits — or avoids singularities where this causes only a small number of additional splits. When applying the refinement scheme iteratively, we extend our binary optimization formulation such that previous splits can be undone if this prevents degenerate cells with small inner angles that otherwise might occur in anisotropic regions or in the vicinity of singularities. We demonstrate on a number of challenging examples that the algorithm performs well in practice.

A fabrication-oriented remeshing method for auxetic pattern extraction

We propose a method for extracting auxetic patterns from meshes for fabrication by modifying the existing mesh primitives directly and fully automatically. This direct approach is novel in the sense that most of the fabricationoriented surface tiling methods introduce additional primitives, such as curve networks in an interactive semiautomatic framework. Our method is based on a remeshing procedure that converts a given quad mesh with arbitrary topology into our desired structure that is ready to be fabricated. The main advantages of establishing auxetic patterns on meshes are the achieved flexibility using cheap inflexible materials as well as less material usage and fabrication time, as demonstrated in our results.

Voxel-based quadrilateral mesh generation from point cloud

In recent years point cloud has been used more and more widely in CAD and computer graphics communities due to the availability of fast and accurate laser scan devices. Many works focus on reconstructing a triangle mesh from a point cloud but few consider the quadrangulate of a point cloud directly. In this paper, a novel method which is able to achieve quad mesh models directly from a point cloud is proposed. The main idea is to use voxel as the intermediate medium between point cloud and grid to generate voxel model, then by mapping vertices of a voxel model outer surface to points to construct quad meshes. Furthermore, quad meshes are refinement through point remapping and meshes regularization to obtain high quality meshes. The experimental results show that our method can efficiently and flexible generate quad mesh based on point cloud directly with better quality and different scales. Especially, this method is much more suitable to tasks expecting less computation time and less manual interaction in rapid prototyping and reverse engineering.

Algebraic Representations for Volumetric Frame Fields

Field-guided parameterization methods have proven effective for quad meshing of surfaces; these methods compute smooth cross fields to guide the meshing process and then integrate the fields to construct a discrete mesh. A key challenge in extending these methods to three dimensions, however, is representation of field values. Whereas cross fields can be represented by tangent vector fields that form a linear space, the 3D analog—an octahedral frame field—takes values in a nonlinear manifold. In this work, we describe the space of octahedral frames in the language of differential and algebraic geometry. With this understanding, we develop geometry-aware tools for optimization of octahedral fields, namely geodesic stepping and exact projection via semidefinite relaxation. Our algebraic approach not only provides an elegant and mathematically sound description of the space of octahedral frames but also suggests a generalization to frames whose three axes scale independently, better capturing the singular behavior we expect to see in volumetric frame fields. These new odeco frames , so called as they are represented by orthogonally decomposable tensors, also admit a semidefinite program–based projection operator. Our description of the spaces of octahedral and odeco frames suggests computing frame fields via manifold-based optimization algorithms; we show that these algorithms efficiently produce high-quality fields while maintaining stability and smoothness.

A boundary element-based automatic domain partitioning approach for semi-structured quad mesh generation

In this paper, a boundary element-based approach is proposed for partitioning a planar domain automatically into a set of 4-sided regions, which is suitable for semi-structured quad mesh generation. The basic idea is to generate a smooth cross-field via solving PDEs with the boundary element method and then partition the input domain by extracting singular structures of the cross-field. Firstly, a cross is configured at each boundary vertex of the input domain. Then, two Laplacian equations are selected as the governing equation to smoothly propagate the crosses defined on the boundary into the interior of the domain. To obtain an accurate cross-field, the boundary element method is used to solve the governing equations. Then the singular vertices are identified by analyzing the structure of the cross-field, and the streamlines emanating from these points are traced and simplified as segmentation curves to partition the domain. Finally, to demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed approach, some quad mesh generation examples and comparison with previous approaches are presented.

Seamless Parametrization with Arbitrary Cones for Arbitrary Genus

Seamless global parametrization of surfaces is a key operation in geometry processing, e.g., for high-quality quad mesh generation. A common approach is to prescribe the parametric domain structure, in particular, the locations of parametrization singularities (cones), and solve a non-convex optimization problem minimizing a distortion measure, with local injectivity imposed through either constraints or barrier terms. In both cases, an initial valid parametrization is essential to serve as a feasible starting point for obtaining an optimized solution. While convexified versions of the constraints eliminate this initialization requirement, they narrow the range of solutions, causing some problem instances that actually do have a solution to become infeasible. We demonstrate that for arbitrary given sets of topologically admissible parametric cones with prescribed curvature, a global seamless parametrization always exists (with the exception of one well-known case). Importantly, our proof is constructive and directly leads to a general algorithm for computing such parametrizations. Most distinctively, this algorithm is bootstrapped with a convex optimization problem (solving for a conformal map), in tandem with a simple linear equation system (determining a seamless modification of this map). This initial map can then serve as a valid starting point and be optimized for low distortion using existing injectivity preserving methods.

Checkerboard patterns with black rectangles

Checkerboard patterns with black rectangles can be derived from quad meshes with orthogonal diagonals. First, we present an initial theoretical analysis of these quad meshes. The analysis reveals many possible applications in geometry processing and also motivates the numerical optimization for aesthetic and functional checkerboard pattern design. Second, we describe an optimization algorithm that transforms initial 2D and 3D quad meshes into quad meshes with orthogonal diagonals. Third, we present a 2D checkerboard pattern design framework based on integer programming inspired by the logo design of the 2020 Olympic games. Our results show a variety of 2D and 3D checkerboard patterns that can be derived from 2D or 3D quad meshes with orthogonal diagonals.

QuadMixer

We propose QuadMixer, a novel interactive technique to compose quad mesh components preserving the majority of the original layouts. Quad Layout is a crucial property for many applications since it conveys important information that would otherwise be destroyed by techniques that aim only at preserving shape. Our technique keeps untouched all the quads in the patches which are not involved in the blending. We first perform robust boolean operations on the corresponding triangle meshes. Then we use this result to identify and build new surface patches for small regions neighboring the intersection curves. These blending patches are carefully quadrangulated respecting boundary constraints and stitched back to the untouched parts of the original models. The resulting mesh preserves the designed edge flow that, by construction, is captured and incorporated to the new quads as much as possible. We present our technique in an interactive tool to show its usability and robustness.

Curve-pleated structures

In this paper we study pleated structures generated by folding paper along curved creases. We discuss their properties and the special case of principal pleated structures. A discrete version of pleated structures is particularly interesting because of the rich geometric properties of the principal case, where we are able to establish a series of analogies between the smooth and discrete situations, as well as several equivalent characterizations of the principal property. These include being a conical mesh, and being flat-foldable. This structure-preserving discretization is the basis of computation and design. We propose a new method for designing pleated structures and reconstructing reference shapes as pleated structures: we first gain an overview of possible crease patterns by establishing a connection to pseudogeodesics, and then initialize and optimize a quad mesh so as to become a discrete pleated structure. We conclude by showing applications in design and reconstruction, including cases with combinatorial singularities. Our work is relevant to fabrication in so far as the offset properties of principal pleated structures allow us to construct curved sculptures of finite thickness.

Surface Fairing towards Regular Principal Curvature Line Networks

AbstractFreeform surfaces whose principal curvature line network is regularly distributed, are essential to many real applications like CAD modeling, architecture design, and industrial fabrication. However, most designed surfaces do not hold this nice property because it is hard to enforce such constraints in the design process. In this paper, we present a novel method for surface fairing which takes a regular distribution of the principal curvature line network on a surface as an objective. Our method first removes the high‐frequency signals from the curvature tensor field of an input freeform surface by a novel rolling guidance tensor filter, which results in a more regular and smooth curvature tensor field, then deforms the input surface to match the smoothed field as much as possible. As an application, we solve the problem of approximating freeform surfaces with regular principal curvature line networks, discretized by quadrilateral meshes. By introducing the circular or conical conditions on the quadrilateral mesh to guarantee the existence of discrete principal curvature line networks, and minimizing the approximate error to the original surface and improving the fairness of the quad mesh, we obtain a regular discrete principal curvature line network that approximates the original surface. We evaluate the efficacy of our method on various freeform surfaces and demonstrate the superiority of the rolling guidance tensor filter over other tensor smoothing techniques. We also utilize our method to generate high‐quality circular/conical meshes for architecture design and cyclide spline surfaces for CAD modeling.

Computing Surface PolyCube‐Maps by Constrained Voxelization

AbstractWe present a novel method to compute bijective PolyCube‐maps with low isometric distortion. Given a surface and its pre‐axis‐aligned shape that is not an exact PolyCube shape, the algorithm contains two steps: (i) construct a PolyCube shape to approximate the pre‐axis‐aligned shape; and (ii) generate a bijective, low isometric distortion mapping between the constructed PolyCube shape and the input surface. The PolyCube construction is formulated as a constrained optimization problem, where the objective is the number of corners in the constructed PolyCube, and the constraint is to bound the approximation error between the constructed PolyCube and the input pre‐axis‐aligned shape while ensuring topological validity. A novel erasing‐and‐filling solver is proposed to solve this challenging problem. Centeral to the algorithm for computing bijective PolyCube‐maps is a quad mesh optimization process that projects the constructed PolyCube onto the input surface with high‐quality quads. We demonstrate the efficacy of our algorithm on a data set containing 300 closed meshes. Compared to state‐of‐the‐art methods, our method achieves higher practical robustness and lower mapping distortion.

Construction and Application of Nine-Tic B-Spline Tensor Product SS

In this paper, we propose and analyze a tensor product of nine-tic B-spline subdivision scheme (SS) to reduce the execution time needed to compute the subdivision process of quad meshes. We discuss some essential features of the proposed SS such as continuity, polynomial generation, joint spectral radius, holder regularity and limit stencil. Some results of the SS using surface modeling with the help of computer programming are shown.

Parametrization quantization with free boundaries for trimmed quad meshing

The generation of quad meshes based on surface parametrization techniques has proven to be a versatile approach. These techniques quantize an initial seamless parametrization so as to obtain an integer grid map implying a pure quad mesh. State-of-the-art methods following this approach have to assume that the surface to be meshed either has no boundary, or has a boundary which the resulting mesh is supposed to be aligned to. In a variety of applications this is not desirable and non-boundary-aligned meshes or grid-parametrizations are preferred. We thus present a technique to robustly generate integer grid maps which are either boundary-aligned, non-boundary-aligned, or partially boundary-aligned, just as required by different applications. We thereby generalize previous work to this broader setting. This enables the reliable generation of trimmed quad meshes with partial elements along the boundary, preferable in various scenarios, from tiled texturing over design and modeling to fabrication and architecture, due to fewer constraints and hence higher overall mesh quality and other benefits in terms of aesthetics and flexibility.

Visual smoothness of polyhedral surfaces

Representing smooth geometric shapes by polyhedral meshes can be quite difficult in situations where the variation of edges and face normals is prominently visible. Especially problematic are saddle-shaped areas of the mesh, where typical vertices with six incident edges are ill suited to emulate the more symmetric smooth situation. The importance of a faithful discrete representation is apparent for certain special applications like freeform architecture, but is also relevant for simulation and geometric computing. In this paper we discuss what exactly is meant by a good representation of saddle points, and how this requirement is stronger than a good approximation of a surface plus its normals. We characterize good saddles in terms of the normal pyramid in a vertex. We show several ways to design meshes whose normals enjoy small variation (implying good saddle points). For this purpose we define a discrete energy of polyhedral surfaces, which is related to a certain total absolute curvature of smooth surfaces. We discuss the minimizers of both functionals and in particular show that the discrete energy is minimal not for triangle meshes, but for principal quad meshes. We demonstrate our procedures for optimization and interactive design by means of meshes intended for architectural design.

Anisotropic convolution surfaces

Convolution surfaces with 1D skeletons have been limited to close-to-circular normal sections. The new formalism presented here allows for ellipsoidal normal sections. Anisotropy is prescribed on G1 skeletal curves, chosen as circular splines, by a rotation angle and the three radii of an ellipsoid at each extremity. This lightweight model creates smooth shapes that previously required tweaking the skeleton or supplementing it with 2D pieces. The scale invariance of our formalism achieves excellent radii control and thus lends itself to approximate a variety of shapes. The construction of a scaffold is extended to skeletons with G1 branches. It projects onto the convolution surface as a quad mesh with skeleton bound edge-flow.