Surface curve design by orthogonal projection of space curves onto free-form surfaces

A novel technique for designing curves on surfaces is presented. The design specifications for this technique derive from other works on curvature continuous surface fairing. Briefly stated, the technique must provide a computationally efficient method for the design of surface curves that is applicable to a very general class of surface formulations. It must also provide means to define a smooth natural map relating two or more surface curves. The resulting technique is formulated as a geometric construction that maps a space curve onto a surface curve. It is designed to be coordinate independent and provides isoparametric maps for multiple surface curves. Generality of the formulation is attained by solving a tensorial differential equation formulated in terms of local differential properties of the surfaces. For an implicit surface, the differential equation is solved in three-space. For a parametric surface the tensorial differential equation is solved in the parametric space associated with the surface representation. This technique has been tested on a broad class of examples including polynomials, splines, transcendental parametric and implicit surface representations.