Dynamic highlight line generation for locally deforming NURBS surfaces

The highlight line model is a powerful tool in assessing the quality of a surface. Efficient highlight line generation is especially important for an interactive design environment. In this paper, a method for dynamic generation of highlight lines on a locally deforming NURBS surface is presented. The method generates frames of the deforming surface and the corresponding highlight lines by directly modifying the current highlight lines using a Taylor expansion technique, instead of going through a tracing process. The highlight lines computation process adopted here enables a unified distance surface to generate all highlight lines in the highlight line family. The computation process is facilitated by looking up pre-calculated information of the tessellation mesh and an indexing technique for the distance surface. The indexing technique is presented to determine when the highlight line model should be re-generated and, to facilitate the highlight line re-generation process. The new technique is suitable for interactive design environments and animation applications as the updating process takes only one subtraction and one vector inner product to get the new parameters for each new node.