A Method for Deforming Polygonal Shapes into Smooth Spline Surface Models

This paper describes a new spline formulation that supports deformation of polygonol shapes into smooth spline surface models. Once a polygonol shape with underlying rectangular topology is specified by the user, it is deformed into a smooth surface that interpolates all the polygonol vertices. The user can then modify the default smooth surface by increasing or decreasing the amount of deformation either globally or locally. This is accomplished by interactively controlling the shape parameters associated with the polygonol vertices. This modelling paradigm is conceptually simple and allows C2 [2 superscript] continuous surfaces to be easily designed, even by a novice user.