Piecewise surface flattening for non-distorted texture mapping

This paper introduces new techniques for interactive piecewise flattening of parametric 3-D surfaces, leading to a non-distorted, hence realistic, texture mapping. Cuts are allowed on the mapped texture and we make a compromise between discontinuities and distortions. These techniques are based on results from differential geometry, more precisely on the notion of " geodesic curvature ": isoparametric curves of the surface are mapped, in a constructive way, onto curves in the texture plane with preservation of geodesic curvature at each point. As an application, we give a concrete example which is a first step towards an efficient and robust CAD tool for shoe modeling.