Automatic texture atlas generation from trimmed NURBS models

A Texture Atlas is a two dimensional representation of a 3D model usable for paint systems or as a sewing pattern. The field of texture atlas generation from polygonal models has been well exploited in the recent years. The developed algorithms work on piecewise linear surface representations, but not on parametric surfaces like NURBS, that are still the main surface representation in CAD systems. If a texture atlas is generated from a triangulated NURBS model, the result cannot be edited further in a CAD system, since the separation into charts is not based on the separate NURBS patches of the original model. We present a method for automatic generation of a texture atlas directly from trimmed NURBS models, while preserving the original NURBS representation. The resulting texture atlas is build of several charts, each consisting of the original NURBS patches sewn together.