GridMesh: Fast and high quality 2D Mesh generation for interactive 3D shape modeling

In this paper we present an algorithm for watertight meshing of closed, sketched curves. The sketch is resampled as a piecewise linear (PWL) curve and placed onto a triangular grid. A small boundary (seed) that describes a closed path along grid points is placed inside the sketch and grown until it resembles the sketch. Vertices of the evolved grid boundary are projected onto the stroke to establish a bijective, ordered mapping. Finally, valences along the boundary are optimized while retaining the previously established mapping. The resulting mesh patch can be duplicated, stitched and inflated to generate a new shape, or used to fill a hole in an existing shape. We have implemented our algorithm in FiberMesh, an interactive sketch based interface for designing freeform surfaces, where it is used for the all mesh generation processes. The triangulation generated with our algorithm improves the quality of the model by reducing the number of irregular vertices, while running at real time rates.