Semester

Fall

Date of Graduation

2010

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Type

PhD

College

Statler College of Engineering and Mineral Resources

Department

Lane Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering

Committee Chair

Tim McGraw.

Abstract

Mesh design is a major bottleneck in the creation of computer games and animation. Therefore simplifying the process of mesh editing is an important problem. Natural mesh processing is generally difficult to perform since natural meshes often have nontrivial surface shapes and high degrees of freedom. In this study I present novel approaches to natural mesh processing utilizing spectral methods based on the manifold harmonic basis.;Geometric scaling transformations do not respect the biological processes which govern the size and shape of living creatures. I describe an approach to scaling which can be related to biological function. Known biological laws of allometry are used which are expressed as power laws to control the mesh deformation in the frequency domain. This approach is motivated by the relation between fractal biological systems and their underlying power-law spectra. I demonstrate my approach to biology-aware character scaling on triangle meshes representing quadrupedal mammals.;Mesh editing is a time-consuming and error-prone process when changes must be manually applied to repeated structures in the mesh. I propose a fast and accurate method for performing region matching which is based on the manifold harmonic transform. Then this matching method is demonstrated in the context of nonlocal mesh editing - propagating mesh editing operations from a single source region to multiple target regions which may be arbitrarily far away. Finally, I show how mesh skeleton generation can be simplified using spectral approaches. These contributions will lead to more efficient methods of mesh editing and character design.

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