Ternary subdivision for quadrilateral meshes

Abstract. A well-documented problem of Catmull and Clark subdivision surfaces is that, in the neighborhood of extraordinary points, the curvature is unbounded and fluctuates. In fact, since one of the eigenvalues that determines elliptic shape is too small, the limit surface can have a saddle point when the designer’s input mesh suggests a convex shape. Here, we replace, near the extraordinary point, Catmull-Clark subdivision by another set of rules based on refining each bi-cubic B-spline into nine. This provides many localized degrees of freedom for special rules that need not reach out to neighbor vertices in order to tune the behavior. In this paper, we provide a strategy for setting such degrees of freedom and exhibit tuned ternary quad subdivision that yields surfaces with bounded curvature, nonnegative weights and full contribution of elliptic and hyperbolic shape components.