It’s that time of year when we can have our socks knocked off from new technologies discussed and revealed at the Siggraph conference. I always look forward to getting the “drool kind” of excited watching great white papers come in. The best technology examples from Siggraph always seem to parallel magic, more than science.
[pullquote]an interactive system for manual quad remeshing that provides the user with a high degree of control while avoiding the tediousness involved in existing manual tools.[/pullquote]Data Driven Interactive Quadrangulation certainly fits in that category.
Data-Driven Interactive Quadrangulation has been conditionally accepted as a white paper for SIGGRAPH 2015. The paper has been floating around in one form or another since 2013 – Sketch-based generation and editing of quad meshes.
The idea comes from research by Giorgio Marcias, Kenshi Takayama, Nico Pietroni, Daniele Panozzo, Olga Sorkine-Hornung, Enrico Puppo, Paolo Cignoni.
The system allows you to suggest a polygon flow direction by drawing a single line, or series of lines. It will then create retopology based on that suggestion drawing from a database of retopology examples.
Retopology is a common part of 3D workflow these days, and while retopology tools are pretty sophisticated in either host 3D applications, or third party tools, something like Data Driven Retopology would mean a huge advancement for that whole workflow.
