Denis Zorin
Caltech
The complexity of geometric models used in animation, modeling and virtual reality applications is constantly increasing. One goal of my research is to find representations of complicated surfaces that would satisfy the demands of such applications.
Most commonly, surfaces are represented using spline patches or polygonal meshes. Starting from an initial polyhedron, subdivision defines a sequence of successively refined meshes. The resulting limit surface can be thought of as a generalized spline surface. In this way, subdivision algorithms bridge the gap between mesh- and patch-based representations.
One of the main challenges in the construction of subdivision schemes is to ensure that the limit surface will be smooth everywhere for an arbitrary initial mesh. I will discuss my work on criteria for establishing smoothness of a large class of subdivision schemes.
Subdivision naturally leads to useful multiresolution representations of surfaces. Such representations can be used for a variety of applications, most importantly, interactive editing and animation.
Combining subdivision and smoothing we can construct a set of algorithms for interactive multiresolution editing of complex meshes with arbitrary topology. Simplicity of the basic algorithms for refinement and coarsification allows us to make them local and adaptive, considerably improving their efficiency. I will demonstrate an interactive multiresolution editing system based on these algorithms.
For more info on these projects, press Multiresolution Meshes.