Abstract:
Motivated by recent work with Steiner patches, a method has been
developed to create C0 tessellations of Steiner patches which
approximate high-order biparametric surfaces. An accompanying technique
has also been created to smooth-shade the tessellation in order to
produce high-quality color raster images. The whole process is an
extension of the tessellation and rendering process using polygons.
The Steiner patch method provides a better approximation with fewer
geometric elements and non-jagged silhouettes.
The tessellation algorithm utilizes the properties of the Bernstein-Bezier representation of Steiner patches. The algorithm fits Steiner patches to ordered surface point and normal data. The resulting tessellation is C0 everywhere and C1 at the data points. The unique normal vectors at the data points are interpolated over the tessellation during rendering in order to produce a smooth looking surface.