Patch Layout from Feature Graph

Structuring of surface meshes is a labor intensive task in reverse engineering. For example in CAD, scanned triangle meshes must be divided into characteristic/uniform patches to enable conversion into high-level spline surfaces. Typical industrial techniques, like rolling ball blends, are very labor intensive. We provide a novel, robust and quick algorithm for the automatic generation of a patch layout based on a topology consistent feature graph. The graph separates the surface along feature lines into functional and geometric building blocks. Our algorithm then thickens thickens the edges of the feature graph and forms new regions with low varying curvature. Further these new regions so called fillets and node patches will have highly smooth boundary curves making it an ideal preprocessor for a subsequent spline fitting algorithm.