Subdivision-Based Representations for Surface Styling and Design

Subdivision surfaces are emerging as a powerful representation for shape design. Their simplicity and potential to overcome difficulties associated with traditional spline-based modeling has made them a popular choice for several applications. Among these, the modeling of animated characters for movie production has, by far, received the most attention in the literature. In contrast, we focus our attention on the use of subdivision surfaces for the automotive, aerospace, and consumer product industrial sectors. Over the past few years we have developed a suite of modeling tools to facilitate a more efficient and smooth transition from the initial stages of design to class-A surfaces. These tools considerably improve the efficiency of certain design operations and, in some cases, enable tasks that are difficult or even impossible to perform using NURBS-based approaches. Our presentation includes a brief review of multiresolution subdivision surfaces, followed by several interactive operations for shape modeling and their potential applications. We discuss the novel aspects of our algorithms and we illustrate them in the context of different design scenarios. We include results of integrating our technology into Dassault Systèmes’ CATIA solid modeler.