Spherical Harmonic Frames for Crease-Aligned Cross Fields
Paul Zhang, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Various applications of cross-field design on surfaces benefit from alignment of these fields to sharp surface creases. Existing methods try to achieve this by aligning to the principal curvature directions, which are both noisy and poor proxies for crease-alignment. As an alternative, we introduce a new class of cross-field energies, built from spherical harmonic functions, that exhibit natural crease alignment. Our approach is based on theoretical analysis of a class of energies that are sensitive to sharp creases on the surface, but are otherwise purely intrinsic. We leverage this pair of properties to generate feature-aligned cross fields and demonstrate their applicability to quad meshing.
Abstract Author(s): Paul Zhang, Josh Vehkter, Edward Chien, Etienne Vouga, Justin Solomon