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8.5.4 Examples

To illustrate constant curvature contouring, we used a wave-like bicubic integral Bézier surface patch (see Fig. 8.11). The boundary twelve control points are coplanar so that the boundary curves form a square. The remaining four interior control points are not on the same plane. The control points are given as follows:
     

Therefore the surface is anti-symmetric with respect to . The wave-like surface can also be expressed in a graph form as with
    (8.132)

where and , . Although the wireframe of the surface looks simple (see Fig. 8.11), the surface is rich in its variety of differential geometry properties. The wave-like surface has four spherical umbilics at , , , with principal curvature values , , , , and one flat umbilic at . None of them are local extrema according to the criterion 9.5.1.

To display the curvature of the subdivided surface clearly, we assigned discrete color to each closed region based on curvature level. The level was determined by taking the average value of the curvature values of the contour curves excluding the boundary lines which form the closed region. We assigned , and to the minimum, zero and maximum curvature values of the whole domain. The color of the curvature values in between is linearly interpolated.



Subsections

Next: 8.5.4.1 Gaussian curvature Up: 8.5 Contouring constant curvature Previous: 8.5.3 Mathematical formulation of   Contents   Index
December 2009