Development of curved surface is a useful tool in CAD(computer aided design) and CAGD(computer aided geometric de-sign) .This paper presents the algorithms for developing (flattening) a smooth continuous curved surface embedded in three-dimen-sional space into a planar shape. First the definition of planar development of a curved surface is presented, and the distortions (at length and area) of development are discussed in this paper. Then several planar flattening methods of curved surface, and their ad-vantages and disadvantages are analyzed in detail. For NURBS(non-uniform rational basic spline) surfaces, which are broadly used in CAGD, we put forward a new planar developing algorithm, i.e. hybrid developing, and present the steps of the algorithm. At last,some examples are used to show the effectiveness of the algorithm.
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