Simple Methods to Represent Shapes with Sample Spheres

Li-Yi Wei, Arjun V Anand, Shally Kumar, Tarun Beri

SIGGRAPH Asia 2020 Technical Communication

Abstract

Representing complex shapes with simple primitives in high accuracy is important for a variety of applications in computer graphics and geometry processing. Existing solutions may produce suboptimal samples or are complex to implement. We present methods to approximate given shapes with user-tunable number of spheres to balance between accuracy and simplicity: touching medial/scale-axis polar balls and k-means smallest enclosing circles. Our methods are easy to implement, run efficiently, and can approach quality similar to manual construction.

Available information

paper (ACM DL) paper (arXiv) video (YouTube)