Surface Reconstruction Based on a Descriptive Approach

The design of complex surfaces is generally hard to achieve. A natural method consists in the subdivision of the global surface into basic surface elements. The different elements are independently designed and then assembled together to represent the final surface. This method requires a classification and a formal description of the basic elements. This chapter presents a general framework for surface description, based on a constructive tree approach. In this tree the leaves are surface primitives and the nodes are constructive operators.