Using one single trimmed B-Spline surface to fill an n-sided hole is a much desired operation in CAD, but few papers have addressed this issue. The paper presents the method of using trimmed B-Spline surfaces to fill n-sided holes based on energy minimization or variational technique. The method is efficient and robust, and takes less than one second to fill n-sided holes with high quality B-Spline surfaces under complex constraints.
As the foundation of filling n-sided holes, some key issues on variational B-Spline technique are also discussed. The variational technique discussed is significantly much more efficient and powerful than previous research, and the result is very accurate to satisfy CAD systems’ high-precision requirements. We demonstrate that, without any pre-calculation, the discussed technique is efficient enough to solve a B-Spline surface with up to 20,000 control points in real time while satisfying an arbitrary combination of point and curve constraints.
