Patent ID: 7940263

Claim:
A curved surface generating method, performed by a computer aided design system or a computer aided manufacturing system including a computer, for generating a curved surface from a group of points formed of a plurality of measurement points obtained as results of shape measurement of an object, comprising: a representative-point selection step, performed by said computer, of selecting a plurality of representative points from the group of points; a principal-curvature calculating step, performed by said computer, of calculating respective principal curvatures at each of the representative points on the basis of positional relationships between each representative point and a plurality of the measurement points existing around this representative point; a line-of-curvature creating step, performed by said computer, of creating a line of curvature on the basis of the principal curvatures at each representative point; and a curved-surface generating step, performed by said computer, of generating a curved surface by using the line of curvature, wherein the principal-curvature calculating step includes, a step of setting a normal at each representative point; a tangential-vector setting step of setting a tangential vector that is orthogonal to the normal; a step of generating element vectors by joining each representative point and each point existing around this representative point; a step of calculating angles formed by the tangential vector and the element vectors around the normal; a step of calculating angles formed by a tangential plane including the tangential vector and planes including the element vectors and defining the angles as curvatures; a step of creating angle-curvature tables by plotting the calculation results on a horizontal axis in angle-curvature tables; and a step of obtaining the principal curvatures on the basis of the curvature tables.