Alias Systems Corp.

Michael Lounsbery

Steve Teodosiadis

A method of converting a subdivision surface to a NURBS representation. Adjacent faces of a subdivision surface are merged into a quadrilateral region, and vertices of the rectangular regions are used to generate a NURBS surface. The merging of faces reduces the number of vertices needed. Faces should not be merged if they do not comprise a quadrilateral region; if they cross an extraordinary point; if they cross a crease; or a face has already been merged. Imaginary vertices can be generated if not enough vertices are present for a face in the subdivision surface to create a corresponding NURBS patch for that face.

Conversion of a hierarchical subdivision surface to nurbs

The present invention assigns a unique name or identifier to a face of a subdivision surface that can be stored and manipulated as a fixed length integer. The face name representation includes a base face index field identifying the base mesh face from which the face being named is derived, a vertex index field identifying the base mesh vertex from which the face is derived, a level field identifying the level of the subdivision face and a path field that identifies the path to the face. The vertices and edges of each face can also be assigned unique names.

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Seattle, WA, United States of America

Michael Lounsbery