Triangulated surface flattening based on the physical shell model.

Triangulated surface flattening plays an important role in the surface shape design of a complex product, such as a vehicle, a train and an air plane. We propose a new method of generating 2D flat patterns from a 3D triangulated surface by the physical shell model to assist in the design of the surface model. The proposed method can be divided into two primary steps: Local and global steps. In the local step, edge based spring stretching and hinge based bending model are constructed and only the local spring stretch element is projected onto the constraint manifold. In the global step, the results of individual projections are combined, and by solving a simplified global matrix, a compromise between all of the individual constraints is obtained, and the global effects are also considered. The result indicates that the proposed method can compute a flattenable mesh surface from complex 3D mesh surfaces successfully and efficiently. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]