“Meshes with Spherical Faces” by Kilian, Ramos-Cisneros, Müller and Pottmann
Conference:
Type(s):
Title:
- Meshes with Spherical Faces
Session/Category Title: All Kinds of Meshes
Presenter(s)/Author(s):
Abstract:
A truly Möbius invariant discrete surface theory must consider meshes where the transformation group acts on all of its elements, including edges and faces. We therefore systematically describe so called sphere meshes with spherical faces and circular arcs as edges. Driven by aspects important for manufacturing, we provide the means to cluster spherical panels by their radii. We investigate the generation of sphere meshes which allow for a geometric support structure and characterize all such meshes with triangular combinatorics in terms of non-Euclidean geometries. We generate sphere meshes with hexagonal combinatorics by intersecting tangential spheres of a reference surface and let them evolve – guided by the surface curvature – to visually convex hexagons, even in negatively curved areas. Furthermore, we extend meshes with circular faces of all combinatorics to sphere meshes by filling its circles with suitable spherical caps and provide a re-meshing scheme to obtain quadrilateral sphere meshes with support structure from given sphere congruences. By broadening polyhedral meshes to sphere meshes we exploit the additional degrees of freedom to minimize intersection angles of neighboring spheres enabling the use of spherical panels that provide a softer perception of the overall surface.
