Peer-reviewed veterinary case report
How to offset 3D mesh surfaces while keeping sharp edges
By Sun H et al.·2026·View original on Europe PMC →
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Original publication title: Variational Mesh Offsetting by Smoothed Winding Number.
Plain-English summary
This research discusses a new method for adjusting the shape of 3D models, which is important in areas like design and animation. The authors created a system that combines two existing techniques: one that can handle complex shapes without losing important details and another that allows for precise control over the shape but can struggle with overlapping parts. Their approach uses a mathematical framework that helps keep the original sharp features of the shape while also reducing problems with intersections. The results indicate that this method successfully adjusts the shape while maintaining the desired characteristics and minimizing overlaps.
Abstract
Surface mesh offsetting is a fundamental operation in various applications (e.g., shape modeling). Implicit methods that contour a volumetric distance field are robust at handling intersection defects, but it is challenging to apply shape control (e.g., preserving sharp features in the input shape) and to avoid undesired topology changes. Explicit methods, which move vertices towards the offset surface (with possible adaptivity), can address the above issues, but it is hard to avoid intersection issues. To combine the advantages of both, we propose a variational framework that takes mesh vertex locations as variables while simultaneously involving a smooth winding-number field associated with the mesh. Under various shape regularizations (e.g., sharp feature preservation) formulated on the mesh, the objective function mainly requires that the input mesh lie on the offset contour of the field induced by the resulting mesh. Such a combination inherits the ability to apply flexible shape regularizations from explicit methods and significantly alleviates intersection issues because of the field. Moreover, the optimization problem is numerically friendly by virtue of the differentiability of the field w.r.t. the mesh vertices. Results show that we can offset a mesh while preserving sharp features of the original surface, restricting selected parts to quadric surfaces and penalizing intersections.
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Search related cases →Original publication on Europe PMC: https://europepmc.org/article/MED/41308093