Patent ID: 8411090

Claim:
A method for flattening a 3D surface into a 2D piece, comprising: constructing, by a constructing unit integrated into a chip, a plurality of wire-patches by feature curves on a surface patch of the 3D surface, wherein each of feature curves comprises a plurality of wire-nodes; computing an optimal 2D angle for each of said wire-nodes of the constructed wire-patches; determining an optimal position for each of said wire-nodes based on the computed optimal 2D angles thereof, respectively; and laying out each of said feature curves in 2D based on the determined optimal position, wherein the optimal 2D angle for each of said wire-nodes is computed based on a constraint that edges on a boundary of the wire-patches in which said wire-nodes are located are simulated as tendon wires with length preserved, and surface-angle variations between the edges and the tendon wires are minimized.