Surface Patches from Unorganized Space Curves

Recent 3D sketch tools produce networks of three-space curves that suggest the contours of shapes. The shapes may be non-manifold, closed three-dimensional, open two-dimensional, or mixed. We describe a system that automatically generates intuitively appealing piecewise-smooth surfaces from such a curve network, and an intelligent user interface for modifying the automatically chosen surface patches. Both the automatic and the semi-automatic parts of the system use a linear algebra representation of the set of surface patches to track the topology. On complicated inputs from ILoveSketch [BBS08], our system allows the user to build the desired surface with just a few mouse-clicks.