Surface Mesh to Volumetric Spline Conversion with Generalized Polycubes

This paper develops a novel volumetric parameterization and spline construction framework, which is an effective modeling tool for converting surface meshes to volumetric splines. Our new splines are defined upon a novel parametric domain called generalized polycubes (GPCs). A GPC comprises a set of regular cube domains topologically glued together. Compared with conventional polycubes (CPCs), the GPC is much more powerful and flexible and has improved numerical accuracy and computational efficiency when serving as a parametric domain. We design an automatic algorithm to construct the GPC domain while also permitting the user to improve shape abstraction via interactive intervention. We then parameterize the input model on the GPC domain. Finally, we devise a new volumetric spline scheme based on this seamless volumetric parameterization. With a hierarchical fitting scheme, the proposed splines can fit data accurately using reduced number of superfluous control points. Our volumetric modeling scheme has great potential in shape modeling, engineering analysis, and reverse engineering applications.