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Mapping a triangulated surface to 2D space (or a tetrahedral mesh to 3D space) is the most fundamental problem in geometry processing.In computational physics, untangling plays an important role in mesh generation: it takes a mesh as an input, and moves the vertices to get rid of foldovers.In fact, mesh untangling can be considered as a special case of mapping where the geometry of the object is to be defined in the map space and the geometric domain is not explicit, supposing that each element is regular.In this paper, we propose a mapping method inspired by the untangling problem and compare its performance to the state of the art.The main advantage of our method is that the untangling aims at producing locally injective maps, which is the major challenge of mapping.In practice, our method produces locally injective maps in very difficult settings, and with less distortion than the previous work, both in 2D and 3D. We demonstrate it on a large reference database as well as on more difficult stress tests.For a better reproducibility, we publish the code in Python for a basic evaluation, and in C++ for more advanced applications.

Layered manufacturing inherently suffers from staircase defects along surfaces that are gently slopped with respect to the build direction. Reducing the slice thickness improves the situation but never resolves it completely as flat layers remain a poor approximation of the true surface in these regions. In addition, reducing the slice thickness largely increases the print time. In this work we focus on a simple yet effective technique to improve the print accuracy for layered manufacturing by filament deposition. Our method works with standard three-axis 3D filament printers (e.g. the typical, widely available 3D printers), using standard extrusion nozzles. It better reproduces the geometry of sloped surfaces without increasing the print time. Our key idea is to perform a local anti-aliasing, working at a sub-layer accuracy to produce slightly curved deposition paths and reduce approximation errors. This is inspired by Computer Graphics anti-aliasing techniques which consider sub-pixel precision to treat aliasing effects. We show that the necessary deviation in height compared to standard slicing is bounded by half the layer thickness. Therefore, the height changes remain small and plastic deposition remains reliable. We further split and order paths to minimize defects due to the extruder nozzle shape, avoiding any change to the existing hardware. We apply and analyze our approach on 3D printed examples, showing that our technique greatly improves surface accuracy and silhouette quality while keeping the print time nearly identical., Comment: 14 pages, 22 figures

In geometry processing, numerical optimization methods often involve solving sparse linear systems of equations. These linear systems have a structure that strongly resembles to adjacency graphs of the underlying mesh. We observe how classic linear solvers behave on this specific type of problems. For the sake of simplicity, we minimise either the squared gradient or the squared Laplacian, evaluated by finite differences on a regular 1D or 2D grid. We observed the evolution of the solution for both energies, in 1D and 2D, and with different solvers: Jacobi, Gauss-Seidel, SSOR (Symmetric successive over-relaxation) and CG (conjugate gradient [She94]). Plotting results at different iterations allows to have an intuition of the behavior of these classic solvers.

L-BFGS is a hill climbing method that is guarantied to converge only for convex problems. In computer graphics, it is often used as a black box solver for a more general class of non linear problems, including problems having many local minima. Some works obtain very nice results by solving such difficult problems with L-BFGS. Surprisingly, the method is able to escape local minima: our interpretation is that the approximation of the Hessian is smoother than the real Hessian, making it possible to evade the local minima. We analyse the behavior of L-BFGS on the design of 2D frame fields. It involves an energy function that is infinitly continuous, strongly non linear and having many local minima. Moreover, the local minima have a clear visual interpretation: they corresponds to differents frame field topologies. We observe that the performances of LBFGS are almost unpredictables: they are very competitive when the field is sampled on the primal graph, but really poor when they are sampled on the dual graph., Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures

We analyze actual methods that generate smooth frame fields both in 2D and in 3D. We formalize the 2D problem by representing frames as functions (as it was done in 3D), and show that the derived optimization problem is the one that previous work obtain via "representation vectors." We show (in 2D) why this non linear optimization problem is easier to solve than directly minimizing the rotation angle of the field, and observe that the 2D algorithm is able to find good fields. Now, the 2D and the 3D optimization problems are derived from the same formulation (based on representing frames by functions). Their energies share some similarities from an optimization point of view (smoothness, local minima, bounds of partial derivatives, etc.), so we applied the 2D resolution mechanism to the 3D problem. Our evaluation of all existing 3D methods suggests to initialize the field by this new algorithm, but possibly use another method for further smoothing.

We propose an algorithm for tracing polylines on a triangle mesh such that: they are aligned with a N-symmetry direction field, and two such polylines cannot cross or merge. This property is fundamental for mesh segmentation and is very difficult to enforce with numerical integration of vector fields. We propose an alternative solution based on "stream-mesh", a new combinatorial data structure that defines, for each point of a triangle edge, where the corresponding polyline leaves the triangle. It makes it possible to trace polylines by iteratively crossing triangles. Vector field singularities and polyline/vertex crossing are characterized and consistently handled. The polylines inherits the cross-free property of the stream-mesh, except inside triangles where avoiding local overlaps would require higher order polycurves.

Flow fields are often represented by a set of static arrows to illustrate scientific vulgarization, documentary film, meteorology, etc. This simple schematic representation lets an observer intuitively interpret the main properties of a flow: its orientation and velocity magnitude. We propose to generate dynamic versions of such representations for 2D unsteady flow fields. Our algorithm smoothly animates arrows along the flow while controlling their density in the domain over time. Several strategies have been combined to lower the unavoidable popping artifacts arising when arrows appear and disappear and to achieve visually pleasing animations. Disturbing arrow rotations in low velocity regions are also handled by continuously morphing arrow glyphs to semi-transparent discs. To substantiate our method, we provide results for synthetic and real velocity field datasets.