Watertight trimmed NURBS

This paper addresses the long-standing problem of the unavoidable gaps that arise when expressing the intersection of two NURBS surfaces using conventional trimmed-NURBS representation. The solution converts each trimmed NURBS into an untrimmed T-Spline, and then merges the untrimmed T-Splines into a single, watertight model. The solution enables watertight fillets of NURBS models, as well as arbitrary feature curves that do not have to follow iso-parameter curves. The resulting T-Spline representation can be exported without error as a collection of NURBS surfaces. © 2008 ACM