Abstract We present a simple and concise discretization of the covariant derivative vector Dirichlet energy for triangle meshes in 3D using Crouzeix‐Raviart finite elements. The discretization is based on linear discontinuous Galerkin elements, and is simple to implement, without compromising on quality: there are two degrees of freedom for each mesh edge, and the sparse Dirichlet energy matrix can be constructed in a single pass over all triangles using a short formula that only depends on the edge lengths, reminiscent of the scalar cotangent Laplacian. Our vector Dirichlet energy discretization can be used in a variety of applications, such as the calculation of Killing fields, parallel transport of vectors, and smooth vector field design. Experiments suggest convergence and suitability for applications similar to other discretizations of the vector Dirichlet energy.

Current quadratic smoothness energies for curved surfaces either exhibit distortions near the boundary due to zero Neumann boundary conditions or they do not correctly account for intrinsic curvature, which leads to unnatural-looking behavior away from the boundary. This leads to an unfortunate trade-off: One can either have natural behavior in the interior or a distortion-free result at the boundary, but not both. We introduce a generalized Hessian energy for curved surfaces, expressed in terms of the covariant one-form Dirichlet energy, the Gaussian curvature, and the exterior derivative. Energy minimizers solve the Laplace-Beltrami biharmonic equation, correctly accounting for intrinsic curvature, leading to natural-looking isolines. On the boundary, minimizers are as-linear-as-possible, which reduces the distortion of isolines at the boundary. We discretize the covariant one-form Dirichlet energy using Crouzeix-Raviart finite elements, arriving at a discrete formulation of the Hessian energy for applications on curved surfaces. We observe convergence of the discretization in our experiments.

In geometry processing, smoothness energies are commonly used to model scattered data interpolation, dense data denoising, and regularization during shape optimization. The squared Laplacian energy is a popular choice of energy and has a corresponding standard implementation: squaring the discrete Laplacian matrix. For compact domains, when values along the boundary are not known in advance, this construction bakes in low-order boundary conditions. This causes the geometric shape of the boundary to strongly bias the solution. For many applications, this is undesirable. Instead, we propose using the squared Frobenius norm of the Hessian as a smoothness energy. Unlike the squared Laplacian energy, this energy’s natural boundary conditions (those that best minimize the energy) correspond to meaningful high-order boundary conditions. These boundary conditions model free boundaries where the shape of the boundary should not bias the solution locally. Our analysis begins in the smooth setting and concludes with discretizations using finite-differences on 2D grids or mixed finite elements for triangle meshes. We demonstrate the core behavior of the squared Hessian as a smoothness energy for various tasks.

The motion of a thin viscous film of fluid on a curved surface exhibits many intricate visual phenomena, which are challenging to simulate using existing techniques. A possible alternative is to use a reduced model, involving only the temporal evolution of the mass density of the film on the surface. However, in this model, the motion is governed by a fourth-order nonlinear PDE, which involves geometric quantities such as the curvature of the underlying surface, and is therefore difficult to discretize. Inspired by a recent variational formulation for this problem on smooth surfaces, we present a corresponding model for triangle meshes. We provide a discretization for the curvature and advection operators which leads to an efficient and stable numerical scheme, requires a single sparse linear solve per time step, and exactly preserves the total volume of the fluid. We validate our method by qualitatively comparing to known results from the literature, and demonstrate various intricate effects achievable by our method, such as droplet formation, evaporation, droplets interaction and viscous fingering. Finally, we extend our method to incorporate non-linear van der Waals forcing terms which stabilize the motion of the film and allow additional effects such as pearling.

Abstract Cubic splines in Euclidean space minimize the mean squared acceleration among all curves interpolating a given set of data points. We extend this observation to the Riemannian manifold of discrete shells in which the associated metric measures both bending and membrane distortion. Our generalization replaces the acceleration with the covariant derivative of the velocity. We introduce an effective time‐discretization for this novel paradigm for navigating shell space. Further transferring this concept to the space of triangular surface descriptors—edge lengths, dihedral angles, and triangle areas—results in a simplified interpolation method with high computational efficiency.

Abstract Fluid simulation plays a key role in various domains of science including computer graphics. While most existing work addresses fluids on bounded Euclidean domains, we consider the problem of simulating the behavior of an incompressible fluid on a curved surface represented as an unstructured triangle mesh. Unlike the commonly used Eulerian description of the fluid using its time‐varying velocity field, we propose to model fluids using their vorticity, i.e., by a (time varying) scalar function on the surface. During each time step, we advance scalar vorticity along two consecutive, stationary velocity fields. This approach leads to a variational integrator in the space continuous setting. In addition, using this approach, the update rule amounts to manipulating functions on the surface using linear operators, which can be discretized efficiently using the recently introduced functional approach to vector fields. Combining these time and space discretizations leads to a conceptually and algorithmically simple approach, which is efficient, time‐reversible and conserves vorticity by construction. We further demonstrate that our method exhibits no numerical dissipation and is able to reproduce intricate phenomena such as vortex shedding from boundaries.

Abstract We prove both in the smooth and discrete setting that the Hessian of an elastic deformation energy results in a proper Riemannian metric on the space of shells (modulo rigid body motions). Based on this foundation we develop a time‐ and space‐discrete geodesic calculus. In particular we show how to shoot geodesics with prescribed initial data, and we give a construction for parallel transport in shell space. This enables, for example, natural extrapolation of paths in shell space and transfer of large nonlinear deformations from one shell to another with applications in animation, geometric, and physical modeling. Finally, we examine some aspects of curvature on shell space.

We present a computational approach for designing wire meshes , i.e., freeform surfaces composed of woven wires arranged in a regular grid. To facilitate shape exploration, we map material properties of wire meshes to the geometric model of Chebyshev nets . This abstraction is exploited to build an efficient optimization scheme. While the theory of Chebyshev nets suggests a highly constrained design space, we show that allowing controlled deviations from the underlying surface provides a rich shape space for design exploration. Our algorithm balances globally coupled material constraints with aesthetic and geometric design objectives that can be specified by the user in an interactive design session. In addition to sculptural art, wire meshes represent an innovative medium for industrial applications including composite materials and architectural façades. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach using a variety of digital and physical prototypes with a level of shape complexity unobtainable using previous methods.

We introduce the heat method \nfor computing the geodesic distance to a \nspecified subset (e.g., point or curve) of a given domain. The heat method is robust, efficient, and simple to implement since it is based on solving \na pair of standard linear elliptic problems. The resulting systems can be prefactored once and subsequently solved in near-linear time. In practice, \ndistance is updated an order of magnitude faster than with state-of-the-art \nmethods, while maintaining a comparable level of accuracy. The method requires only standard differential operators and can hence be applied on \na wide variety of domains (grids, triangle meshes, point clouds, etc.). We \nprovide numerical evidence that the method converges to the exact distance \nin the limit of refinement; we also explore smoothed approximations of \ndistance suitable for applications where greater regularity is required.

Abstract Building on concepts from continuum mechanics, we offer a computational model for geodesics in the space of thin shells, with a metric that reflects viscous dissipation required to physically deform a thin shell. Different from previous work, we incorporate bending contributions into our deformation energy on top of membrane distortion terms in order to obtain a physically sound notion of distance between shells, which does not require additional smoothing. Our bending energy formulation depends on the so‐called relative Weingarten map, for which we provide a discrete analogue based on principles of discrete differential geometry. Our computational results emphasize the strong impact of physical parameters on the evolution of a shell shape along a geodesic path.

Abstract We introduce a discrete paradigm for developable surface modeling. Unlike previous attempts at interactive developable surface modeling, our system is able to enforce exact developability at every step, ensuring that users do not inadvertently suggest configurations that leave the manifold of admissible folds of a flat two‐dimensional sheet. With methods for navigation of this highly nonlinear constraint space in place, we show how to formulate a discrete mean curvature bending energy measuring how far a given discrete developable surface is from being flat. This energy enables relaxation of user‐generated configurations and suggests a straightforward subdivision scheme that produces admissible smoothed versions of bent regions of our discrete developable surfaces.

Given a function f on a surface and a tolerance δ>0, we construct a function f δ subject to ‖f δ −f‖∞≤δ such that f δ has a minimum number of critical points. Our construction relies on a connection between discrete Morse theory and persistent homology and completely removes homological noise with persistence ≤2δ from the input function f. The number of critical points of the resulting simplified function f δ achieves the lower bound dictated by the stability theorem of persistent homology. We show that the simplified function can be computed in linear time after persistence pairs have been computed.

While the theory and applications of discrete Laplacians on triangulated surfaces are well developed, far less is known about the general polygonal case. We present here a principled approach for constructing geometric discrete Laplacians on surfaces with arbitrary polygonal faces, encompassing non-planar and non-convex polygons. Our construction is guided by closely mimicking structural properties of the smooth Laplace--Beltrami operator. Among other features, our construction leads to an extension of the widely employed cotan formula from triangles to polygons. Besides carefully laying out theoretical aspects, we demonstrate the versatility of our approach for a variety of geometry processing applications, embarking on situations that would have been more difficult to achieve based on geometric Laplacians for simplicial meshes or purely combinatorial Laplacians for general meshes.

We study discrete curvatures computed from nets of curvature lines on a given smooth surface and prove their uniform convergence to smooth principal curvatures. We provide explicit error bounds, with constants depending only on properties of the smooth limit surface and the shape regularity of the discrete net.

We present a continuum-based discrete model for thin threads of viscous fluid by drawing upon the Rayleigh analogy to elastic rods, demonstrating canonical coiling, folding, and breakup in dynamic simulations. Our derivation emphasizes space-time symmetry, which sheds light on the role of time-parallel transport in eliminating---without approximation---all but an O ( n ) band of entries of the physical system's energy Hessian. The result is a fast, unified, implicit treatment of viscous threads and elastic rods that closely reproduces a variety of fascinating physical phenomena, including hysteretic transitions between coiling regimes, competition between surface tension and gravity, and the first numerical fluid-mechanical sewing machine. The novel implicit treatment also yields an order of magnitude speedup in our elastic rod dynamics.

We present a discrete treatment of adapted framed curves, parallel transport, and holonomy, thus establishing the language for a discrete geometric model of thin flexible rods with arbitrary cross section and undeformed configuration. Our approach differs from existing simulation techniques in the graphics and mechanics literature both in the kinematic description---we represent the material frame by its angular deviation from the natural Bishop frame---as well as in the dynamical treatment---we treat the centerline as dynamic and the material frame as quasistatic. Additionally, we describe a manifold projection method for coupling rods to rigid-bodies and simultaneously enforcing rod inextensibility. The use of quasistatics and constraints provides an efficient treatment for stiff twisting and stretching modes; at the same time, we retain the dynamic bending of the centerline and accurately reproduce the coupling between bending and twisting modes. We validate the discrete rod model via quantitative buckling, stability, and coupled-mode experiments, and via qualitative knot-tying comparisons.

We combine the often opposing forces of artistic freedom and mathematical determinism to enrich a given animation or simulation of a surface with physically based detail. We present a process called tracking , which takes as input a rough animation or simulation and enhances it with physically simulated detail. Building on the foundation of constrained Lagrangian mechanics, we propose weak-form constraints for tracking the input motion. This method allows the artist to choose where to add details such as characteristic wrinkles and folds of various thin shell materials and dynamical effects of physical forces. We demonstrate multiple applications ranging from enhancing an artist's animated character to guiding a simulated inanimate object.

We introduce FreeLence, a novel and simple single-rate compression coder for triangle manifold meshes. Our method uses free valences and exploits geometric information for connectivity encoding. Furthermore, we introduce a novel linear prediction scheme for geometry compression of 3D meshes. Together, these approaches yield a significant entropy reduction for mesh encoding with an average of 20-30 % over leading single-rate regiongrowing coders, both for connectivity and geometry.