Geometric Modeling Based on Triangle Meshes

Abstract

In the last years triangle meshes have become increasingly popular and are nowadays intensively used in many different areas of computer graphics and geometry processing. In classical CAGD irregular triangle meshes developed into a valuable alternative to traditional spline surfaces, since their conceptual simplicity allows for more flexible and highly efficient processing. Moreover, the consequent use of triangle meshes as surface representation avoids error-prone conversions, e.g., from CAD surfaces to meshbased input data of numerical simulations. Besides classical geometric modeling, other major areas frequently employing triangle meshes are computer games and movie production. In this context geometric models are often acquired by 3D scanning techniques and have to undergo postprocessing and shape optimization techniques before being actually used in production.This course discusses the whole geometry processing pipeline based on triangle meshes. We will first introduce general concepts of surface representations and point out the advantageous properties of triangle meshes in Section 2, and present efficient data structures for their implementation in Section 3. The different sources of input data and types of geometric and topological degeneracies and inconsistencies are described in Section 4, as well as techniques for their removal, resulting in clean two-manifold meshes suitable for further processing. Mesh quality criteria measuring geometric smoothness and element shape together with the corresponding analysis techniques are presented in Section 6. Mesh smoothing reduces noise in scanned surfaces by generalizing signal processing techniques to irregular triangle meshes (Section 7). Similarly, the underlying concepts from differential geometry are useful for surface parametrization as well (Section 8). Due to the enormous complexity of meshes acquired by 3D scanning, mesh decimation techniques are required for error-controlled simplification (Section 9). The shape of triangles, which is important for the robustness of numerical simulations, can be optimized by general remeshing methods (Section 10). After optimizing meshes with respect to the different quality criteria, we finally present techniques for intuitive and interactive shape deformation (Section 11). Since solving linear systems is a commonly required component for many of the presented mesh processing algorithms, we will discuss their efficient solution and compare several existing libraries in Section 12.