This work investigates ribbon-based multi-sided surfaces that satisfy positional and cross-derivative constraints to ensure smooth transitions with adjacent tensor-product and multi-sided surfaces. The influence of cross-derivatives, crucial to surface quality, is studied within Kato’s transfinite surface interpolation instead of control point-based methods. To enhance surface quality, the surface is optimized using cost functions based on curvature metrics. Specifically, a Gaussian curvature-based cost function is also proposed in this work. An automated optimization procedure is introduced to determine rotation angles of cross-derivatives around normals and their magnitudes along curves in Kato’s interpolation scheme. Experimental results using both primitive (e.g., spherical) and realistic examples highlight the effectiveness of the proposed approach in improving surface quality.

Shape decompositions that are guided by a motorcycle graph endow topological properties that are relevant for many engineering applications, such as T-spline fitting, shape compression and structured mesh generation. While for the surface case this is a widely studied and well-established construction, the concept of motorcycle graph was lifted to volumes only recently (Brückler et al., 2021). Due to this recent introduction, the generation of volumetric motorcycle graphs that fulfill application dependent criteria, such as minimal number of blocks or high approximation capabilities, is still an open problem. In this article we study and compare two alternative approaches to the computation of volume shape decompositions guided by a motorcycle graph. The proposed methodologies are designed to optimize alternative application-dependent quality criteria and, overall, perform better than prior art in most of the cases.

Product data management (PDM) is a popular topic for concurrent engineering to manage and access to product data in a company. There are commercial PDM softwares and companies use different PDM systems which are most suitable for their needs. For collaboration with their suppliers, companies need to interface their PDM systems with PDM systems of their suppliers. It will result faster product information flow between OEM and its suppliers. This study proposes to integrate 2 different PDM systems by PLM services, which is based on Web services. PLM services enables the data exchange through the Internet