An approach of designing and controlling free-form surfaces by using NURBS boundary Gregory patches Original Research Article

Designers require a means of designing complex free-form surfaces easily and intuitively. One general approach to designing such surfaces is to first define a curve mesh consisting of characteristic lines, such as cross sections and boundary curves, then to interpolate the curve mesh using free-form surfaces. NURBS surfaces are widely used but make the interpolation of an irregular curve mesh difficult. This has been a major limiting constraint on designers. In this paper, we propose a new surface representation that enables the smooth interpolation of an irregular curve mesh with NURBS curves and surfaces.