Figure 1: The 3D sketch on the left implies a surface consisting of eight patches, four of which are complex and highly non-planar. Our system automatically divides these complex patches into smaller ones that are simpler and therefore easier to tessellate (middle). Displaying the simplified patches (right) during interactive sketching can both improve visualization and provide new opportunities for natural interaction, such as sketching on the resulting patches.
Abstract3D sketching is an appealing approach for creating concept shapes in the early stages of design. While curve networks alone can convey shape, surfacing the network can dramatically help with visualization and interaction. Unfortunately, surfacing a curve network is an inherently ambiguous problem, and even if the correct surface patches are identified, they can have an arbitrarily complex 3D geometry, making it challenging to produce a reasonable tessellation. In this paper we address the problem of creating light-weight surface tessellations on the fly. Our approach is to identify potential patches in the curve network, and then break complicated patches into simpler ones which can be tessellated using any simple algorithm. Our surfacing approach relies on the observation that breaking a complicated patch into a set of nearly planar ones with small total area seems to create a simple, natural-looking surfaces. We demonstrate our approach on curve networks generated by two different 3D sketching systems.