This book is written for students, CAD system users and software developers who are interested in geometric continuity—a notion needed in everyday practice of Computer-Aided Design and also a hot subject of research. It contains a description of the classical geometric spline curves and a solid theoretical basis for various constructions of smooth surfaces. Textbooks on computer graphics usually cover the most basic and necessary information about spline curves and surfaces in order to explain simple algorithms. In textbooks on geometric design, one can find more details, more algorithms and more theory. This book teaches how various parts of the theory can be gathered together and turned into constructions of smooth curves and smooth surfaces of arbitrary topology. The mathematical background needed to understand this book is similar to what is necessary to read other textbooks on geometric design; most of it is basic linear algebra and analysis. More advanced mathematical material is introduced using elementary explanations. Reading Geometric Continuity of Curves and Surfaces provides an excellent opportunity to recall and exercise necessary mathematical notions and it may be your next step towards better practice and higher understanding of design principles.

"Curves and Surfaces in Geometric Modeling: Theory and Algorithms offers a theoretically unifying understanding of polynomial curves and surfaces as well as an effective approach to implementation that you can apply to your own work as a graduate student, scientist, or practitioner." "The focus here is on blossoming - the process of converting a polynomial to its polar form - as a natural, purely geometric explanation of the behavior of curves and surfaces. This insight is important for more than just its theoretical elegance - the author demonstrates the value of blossoming as a practical algorithmic tool for generating and manipulating curves and surfaces that meet many different criteria. You'll learn to use this and other related techniques drawn from affine geometry for computing and adjusting control points, deriving the continuity conditions for splines, creating subdivision surfaces, and more." "It will be an essential acquisition for readers in many different areas, including computer graphics and animation, robotics, virtual reality, geometric modeling and design, medical imaging, computer vision, and motion planning."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Preface -- Chapter 1 P. B̌ezier: How a Simple System Was Born -- Chapter 2 Introductory Material -- Chapter 3 Linear Interpolation -- Chapter 4 The de Casteljau Algorithm -- Chapter 5 The Bernstein Form of a B̌ezier Curve -- Chapter 6 B̌ezier Curve Topics -- Chapter 7 Polynomial Curve Constructions -- Chapter 8 B-Spline Curves -- Chapter 9 Constructing Spline Curves -- Chapter 10 W. Boehm: Differential Geometry I -- Chapter 11 Geometric Continuity -- Chapter 12 ConicSections -- Chapter 13 Rational B̌ezier and B-Spline Curves -- Chapter 14 Tensor Product Patches -- Chapter 15 Constructing Polynomial Patches -- Chapter 16 Composite Surfaces -- Chapter 17 B̌ezier Triangles -- Chapter 18 Practical Aspects of B̌ezier Triangles -- Chapter 19 W. Boehm: Differential Geometry II -- Chapter 20 GeometricContinuityforSurfaces -- Chapter 21 Surfaces with Arbitrary Topology -- Chapter 22 Coons Patches -- Chapter 23 Shape -- Chapter 24 Evaluation of Some Methods -- Appendix A Quick Reference of Curve ...

This collection of ideas and results on topics of curve and surface design is intended for research in the academic environment as well as for practical use in industrial applications. Main emphasis is on minimal energy splines and geometric spline curves, and on techniques beyond tensor product surfaces.

As the field of computer graphics develops, techniques for modeling complex curves and surfaces are increasingly important. A major technique is the use of parametric splines in which a curve is defined by piecing together a succession of curve segments, and surfaces are defined by stitching together a mosaic of surface patches. An Introduction to Splines for Use in Computer Graphics and Geometric Modeling discusses the use of splines from the point of view of the computer scientist. Assuming only a background in beginning calculus, the authors present the material using many examples and illustrations with the goal of building the reader's intuition. Based on courses given at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Waterloo, as well as numerous ACM Siggraph tutorials, the book includes the most recent advances in computer-aided geometric modeling and design to make spline modeling techniques generally accessible to the computer graphics and geometric modeling communities.

Computer disk contains: "data sets, as well as all of the C routines found in the book."