Designing B-Spline Surfaces With Haptics Based on Energy Minimization Method
Designing B-Spline Surfaces is difficult and cumbersome with traditional 2D based interfaces, e.g., a 2D mouse. Based on energy minimization or variational surfacing technique, the paper presents a technique for using a haptic device to design B-Spline surfaces. In our system, a haptic interface is used to directly manipulate/design key constraints in a natural 3D environment, and the system uses energy minimization method to generate the “smoothest” B-Spline surface that satisfies these constraints in real-time. The discussed technique is significantly much more efficient and powerful than previous research, and without any pre-calculation, it can solve a B-Spline surface with up to 20,000 control points in real-time and, at the same time, produce high quality B-Spline surfaces satisfying an arbitrary combination of point and curve constraints.