(* Joint Last authors)
We present a computational approach for unfolding 3D shapes isometrically into the plane as a single patch without overlapping triangles. This is a hard, sometimes impossible, problem, which existing methods are forced to soften by allowing for map distortions or multiple patches. Instead, we propose a geometric relaxation of the problem: we modify the input shape until it admits an overlap-free unfolding. We achieve this by locally displacing vertices and collapsing edges, guided by the unfolding process. We validate our algorithm quantitatively and qualitatively on a large dataset of complex shapes and show its proficiency by fabricating real shapes from paper.
@article{https://doi.org/10.1111/cgf.15269,
author = {Bhargava, M. and Schreck, C. and Freire, M. and Hugron, P. A. and Lefebvre, S. and Sellán, S. and Bickel, B.},
title = {Mesh Simplification for Unfolding},
journal = {Computer Graphics Forum},
volume = {n/a},
number = {n/a},
pages = {e15269},
keywords = {fabrication, single patch unfolding, mesh simplification},
doi = {https://doi.org/10.1111/cgf.15269},
url = {https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/cgf.15269},
eprint = {https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/cgf.15269},
}
Researchers from INRIA received support from the DORNELL Inria Challenge. Silvia Sellán acknowledges support from NSERC Vanier Doctoral Scholarship and an MIT SoE Postdoctoral Fellowship for Engineering Excellence.