A refinable space of smooth spline surfaces of arbitrary topological genus (Q1365558)

In this paper the author presents a way of constructing smooth spline surfaces of arbitrary topological type. It is to use exclusively parametric smoothness conditions and to overcome the related difficulties by introducing surface patches which are degenerate in the sense that their partial derivatives vanish at exra ordinary vertices, for example, the partial derivatives of order \((1,0)\), \((0,1)\) and \((1,1)\) vanish at one of the corners. It is shown that the method can be generalised to degenerate patches based on arbitrary analytic basis functions, thus extending the range of applicability to most spline models currently in use. The major benefit of this approach appears to be that it admits the construction of spline spaces which have natural refinement property.