Patent ID: 7643026

Claim:
An apparatus for deforming a curved surface using a three-dimensional target curve, the apparatus being based on a computer and adapted to deform a curved surface of a Non-Uniform Rational B-Spline (NURBS) model, comprising: a computer usable medium having a computer readable program code embodied therein, said computer readable program code adapted to be executed for the following: object curved surface selection means for selecting all or part of the curved surface of the NURBS model as an object curved surface; sample vertex extraction means for extracting a plurality of vertexes from the object curved surface as sample vertexes; basis function calculation means for calculating a basis function of the object curved surface; target curve input means for inputting a target curve, composed of a plurality of target points having locations and directions, from a user; target curve projection means for projecting the target curve onto the object curved surface; control point variation calculation means for individually interpolating variation values x, y, and z ranging from projection points of the object curved surface corresponding to the target points, calculating variation values of sample vertexes included in a deformation area, and calculating variations of control points, constituting the object curved surface, using the calculated variation values and a pseudo-inverse matrix of the basis function; and object curved surface deformation means for deforming the object curved surface of the curved surface of the NURBS model on the basis of the calculated variations of the control points, and wherein the target curve projection means projects the target curve in such a way that, if a number of target points constituting the target curve is equal to or less than a predetermined value, virtual target points are generated through curve interpolation.