Fast Generation of NURBS Surfaces from Polygonal Mesh Models of Human Anatomy

Visible Productions, Inc., of Fort Collins, CO, produces 3-D human models that are recognized as some of the most accurate models in the world. Their models currently are based on meshes of 3-D triangles. Such meshes can be rendered as smooth surfaces byinterpolating color values across a triangular mesh, but for a number of applications the smooth surface must be explicitly represented. Clients for Visible Productions' models have asked for surfaces de#ned by NURBS #Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines#. This project developed and implemented algorithms for transforming polygonal meshes into NURBS. This requires a time-intensive, iterative optimization process. Weinvestigated the use of neural networks to by-pass a large part of the optimization process. 1 Problem Visible Productions, Ltd., of Fort Collins, CO, and other companies produce polygon-based, 3-D models of organic structures in humans and animals. There is already a large database of excellent 3-D anatomical models exis..