SYSTEMS AND METHODS FOR GENERATING AND MEASURING SURFACE LINES ON MESH SURFACES AND VOLUME OBJECTS AND MESH CUTTING TECHNIQUES ('CURVED MEASUREMENT')

摘要

Systems and methods are presented for generating surface lines on meshsurfaces and voxel objects. In exemplary embodiments of the present inventiondirected to mesh surfaces, such methods include preprocessing a triangle meshdata structure, constructing a grid data structure for the triangle meshobject, representing a relationship of triangles and vertices, determiningboundary edges and vertices, computing a series of surface points, andgenerating a surface line. In exemplary embodiments of the present inventionthis technique can be used to cut a mesh surface along the line generated. Inexemplary embodiments of the present invention a surface line can be generatedfrom start point A to end point B along an arbitrary curved surface based onthe start point and the direction of a vector from the start point to the endpoint. In such embodiments a point having a small displacement away from thestart point can be defined as a reference point, and such reference point canbe rotated along an axis defined by the normal of a defined plane to obtain aninitial surface point. By repeating the above process using each obtainedsurface point as a new start point a surface line can be generated from pointA to point B on a voxel object's surface. In exemplary embodiments of thepresent invention such surface lines can be used to perform measurements ofvolumes of such voxel objects.