• Korean Journal of Computational Design and Engineering
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• v.4 no.1
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• pp.32-42
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• 1999

Approximate lofting or skinning is one of practical surface modeling techniques well used in CAD and reverse engineering applications. Presented in this paper is a method for approximately lofting a given set of curves wihin a specified tolereance. It is based on refitting input curves simultaneously on a common knot vector and interpolating them to get a resultant NURBS surface. A concept of reducing the number of interior knots of the common knot vector is well adopted to acquire more compact representation for the resultant surface. Energy minimization is newly introduced in curve refitting process to stabilize the solution of the fitting problem and get more fair curve. The proposed approximate lofting provides more smooth surface models and realizes more efficient data reduction expecially when the parameterization and compatibility of input curves are not good enough. The method has been successfully implemented in a new CAD/CAM product VX Vision? of Varimetrix Corporation.