Mesh Simplification For Unfolding

(* Joint Last authors)
Computer Graphics Forum 2024

Abstract

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.

Acknowledgements

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.

Citation

				
					@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},
}