Developability-preserved free-form deformation of assembled patches

A novel and practical approach is presented in this paper that solves a constrained free-form deformation (FFD) problem where the developability of the tessellated embedded surface patches is preserved during the lattice deformation. The formulated constrained FFD problem has direct application in areas of product design where the surface developability is required, such as clothing, ship hulls, automobile parts, etc. In the proposed approach, the developability-preserved FFD problem is formulated as a constrained optimization problem. Different from other contained FFD approaches, the positions of lattice control points are not modified in our algorithm -- as their control is insufficient in regards to the developability of all the nodes in the mesh. Moreover, the optimization is performed on the parameters of the mesh nodes rather than directly modifying their 3D coordinates, which avoids the time-consuming inverse calculation of the parameters of every node in a non-parallelepiped control lattice when further deformations are required.