Optimal Intersection Curves for Surfaces

In this article, an algorithm has been established to approximate parametric-parametric, explicit-implicit, and explicit-explicit surface intersection. Foremost, it extracts the characteristic points (boundary and turning points) from the sequence of intersection points and fits an optimal cubic spline curve to these points. Moreover, this paper utilizes genetic algorithm (GA) for optimization of shape parameters in the portrayal of cubic spline so that the error is minimal. The proposed algorithm is demonstrated with different types of surfaces to analyze its robustness and proficiency. In the end, all illustrations show the effectiveness of the algorithm which makes it more influential to resolve all complexities arises during intersection with a minimal error.

A Combinatorial Approach for Constructing Lattice Structures

Lattice structures exhibit unique properties including a large surface area and a highly distributed load-path. This makes them very effective in engineering applications where weight reduction, thermal dissipation, and energy absorption are critical. Furthermore, with the advent of additive manufacturing (AM), lattice structures are now easier to fabricate. However, due to inherent surface complexity, their geometric construction can pose significant challenges. A classic strategy for constructing lattice structures exploits analytic surface–surface intersection; this, however, lacks robustness and scalability. An alternate strategy is voxel mesh-based isosurface extraction. While this is robust and scalable, the surface quality is mesh-dependent, and the triangulation will require significant postdecimation. A third strategy relies on explicit geometric stitching where tessellated open cylinders are stitched together through a series of geometric operations. This was demonstrated to be efficient and scalable, requiring no postprocessing. However, it was limited to lattice structures with uniform beam radii. Furthermore, existing algorithms rely on explicit convex-hull construction which is known to be numerically unstable. In this paper, a combinatorial stitching strategy is proposed where tessellated open cylinders of arbitrary radii are stitched together using topological operations. The convex hull construction is handled through a simple and robust projection method, avoiding expensive exact-arithmetic calculations and improving the computational efficiency. This is demonstrated through several examples involving millions of triangles. On a typical eight-core desktop, the proposed algorithm can construct approximately up to a million cylinders per second.

An Approach to Computing Multipoint Inversion and Multiray Surface Intersection on Parametric Surface

This article presents a method for multipoint inversion and multiray surface intersection problem on the parametric surface. By combining tracing along the surface and classical Newton iteration, it can solve point inversion and ray-surface intersection issues concerning a large number of points or rays in a stable and high-speed way. What is more, the computation result can approximate to exact solutions with arbitrary precision because of the self-correction of Newton-Raphson iteration. The main ideas are adopting a scheme tracing along the surface to obtain a good initial point, which is close to the desired point with any prescribed precision, and conducting Newton iteration process with the point as a start point to compute desired parameters. The new method enhances greatly iterative convergence rate compared with traditional Newton’s iteration related methods. In addition, it has a better performance than traditional methods, especially in dealing with multipoint inversion and multiray surface intersection problems. The result shows that the new method is superior to them in both speed and stability and can be widely applied to industrial and research field related to CAD and CG.