Developable Quad Meshes
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There are different ways to capture the property of a surface being developable, i.e., it can be mapped to a planar domain without stretching or tearing. Contributions range from special parametrizations to discrete-isometric mappings. So far, a local criterion expressing the developability of general quad meshes has been lacking. In this paper, we propose a new and efficient discrete developability criterion that is based on a property well-known from differential geometry, namely a rank-deficient second fundamental form. This criterion is expressed in terms of the canonical checkerboard patterns inscribed in a quad mesh which already was successful in describing discrete-isometric mappings. In combination with standard global optimization procedures, we are able to perform developable lofting, approximation, and design. The meshes we employ are combinatorially regular quad meshes with isolated singularities but are otherwise not required to follow any special curves. They are thus easily embedded into a design workflow involving standard operations like re-meshing, trimming, and merging operations.
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