Bounded-distortion piecewise mesh parameterization

Abstract

Many computer graphics operations, such as texture mapping, 3D painting, remeshing, mesh compression, and digital geometry processing, require finding a low-distortion parameterization for irregular connectivity triangulations of arbitrary genus 2-manifolds. This paper presents a simple and fast method for computing parameterizations with strictly bounded distortion. The new method operates by flattening the mesh onto a region of the 2D plane. To comply with the distortion bound, the mesh is automatically cut and partitioned on-the-fly. The method guarantees avoiding global and local self-intersections, while attempting to minimize the total length of the introduced seams. To our knowledge, this is the first method to compute the mesh partitioning and the parameterization simultaneously and entirely automatically, while providing guaranteed distortion bounds. Our results on a variety of objects demonstrate that the method is fast enough to work with large complex irregular meshes in interactive applications.