g-splines (Q2640314)

A commonly occurring problem in computer-aided design is how to efficiently construct a spline surface which satisfies standard continuity conditions across patch boundaries and at the same time can be used to model general free-form surfaces which may have corners and other types of singular vertices. A possible solution to this problem is to use the concept of geometric continuity. With this concept standard continuity conditions are applied only after an appropriate reparametrization. In this paper the authors show how a generalization of a method proposed by Goodman, which was based on geometric continuity and quadratic patches, can be used for a network of rectangular polynomial patches with isolated singular vertices. The authors consider different choices for the reparametrization and how these are affected by the smoothness constraints. They show that carefully chosen smoothness constraints can lead to a problem which is linear and they determine the dimension of the resulting linear space of g-splines. Many of the details are illustrated using concrete examples of \(C^ 1\) rectangular patch networks which have isolated singular vertices.