evolute. blog
behind the scenes
July 23, 2012 at 12:11
filed under EvoluteTools
Tagged conjugate, curves, evolute, evolutetools, geometry optimization, mesh, planar quad, pq mesh, principal curvature lines
Quite often, our clients request new features in EvoluteTools PRO and we add them, other times we are the ones who need new features as we use EvoluteTools PRO extensively in our consulting projects. Recently we just added an important bit of functionality – computation and extraction of Conjugate Curves. What is it about ? In short, if you are planning to discretize a freeform surface with a planar quad mesh or create a semi-discrete developable strip model, you used to have two options: on one hand – create the discrete counterpart by following the Principal Curvature Lines, or create any mesh you want and use the brute force (Planarity Optimization) to get the mesh faces flat. The disadvantage is that you don’t have much control over the direction of the families of curves defining the seams of the panels.
Now there is a third option: you have the possibility to prescribe the first family of curves and let EvoluteTools PRO compute the Conjugate Directions in order to maintain planarity of faces in the mesh corresponding to the Conjugate Curve Network. You can prescribe as many guiding curves as you want for the first family, furthermore, those curves don’t necessarily have to be precisely on your reference surface, they can be quite a distance away.
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