Fitting smooth surfaces to dense polygon meshes

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Recent progress in acquiring shape from range data permits the acquisition of seamless million-polygon meshes from physical models. In this paper, we present an algorithm and system for converting dense irregular polygon meshes of arbitrary topology into tensor product B-spline surface patches with accompanying displacement maps. This choice of representation yields a coarse but efficient model suitable for animation and a fine but more expensive model suitable for rendering.