DA Wand: Distortion-Aware Selection Using Neural Mesh Parameterization
Authors: Richard Liu, Noam Aigerman, Vladimir G. Kim, Rana Hanocka

We present a neural technique for learning to select a local sub-region around a point which can be used for mesh parameterization. The motivation for our framework is driven by interactive workflows used for decaling, texturing, or painting on surfaces. Our key idea to to learn a local parameterization in a data-driven manner, using a novel differentiable parameterization layer within a neural network framework. We train a segmentation network to select 3D regions that are parameterized into 2D and penalized by the resulting distortion, giving rise to segmentations which are distortion-aware. Following training, a user can use our system to interactively select a point on the mesh and obtain a large, meaningful region around the selection which induces a low-distortion parameterization. Our code and project page are publicly available.