Narrowing-Cascade splines for control nets that shed mesh lines

Quad-dominant meshes are popular with animation designers and can efficiently be generated from point clouds. To join primary regions, quad-dominant meshes include non-4-valent vertices and non-quad regions. To transition between regions of rich detail and simple shape, quad-dominant meshes commonly use a cascade of n-1 triangles that reduce the number of parallel quad strips from n+1 to 2. For these cascades, the Narrowing-Cascade spline, short NCn, provides a new shape-optimized G(1) spline surface. NCn can treat cascade meshes as B-spline-like control nets. For n > 3 , as opposed to , cascades have interior points that both guide and complicate the construction of the output tensor-product NC spline. The NCn spline follows the input mesh, including interior points, and delivers a high-quality curved surface of low degree.