Patent Document ID: 9972128
Application ID: 13948016
Patent Status: 1

Claim One:
1. A method for generating a polycube representation of an input object, the method comprising: receiving, at a processor, an input volumetric representation of the input object; deforming, by the processor, the input volumetric representation to provide a deformed object representation; extracting, by the processor, a polycube representation of the object from the deformed object representation, the polycube representation comprising a solid figure made of cubes joined face to face, the solid figure comprising axis-aligned surface planes which having normal vectors that align with one of six directions (±X,±Y,±Z) aligned with a set of global Cartesian axes; wherein deforming, by the processor, the input volumetric representation to provide the deformed object representation comprises effecting, by the processor, a tradeoff between competing objectives of: deforming the input volumetric representation in a manner which provides surfaces having normal vectors closely aligned with one of the six directions aligned with the set of global Cartesian axes; and deforming the input volumetric representation in a manner which provides low-distortion deformations; wherein deforming, by the processor, the input volumetric representation to provide the deformed object representation comprises starting with the input volumetric representation as a current model and then iteratively deforming the current model, wherein each iteration comprises effecting, by the processor, a tradeoff between competing objectives of: deforming the current model in a manner which provides surfaces having normal vectors closely aligned with one of the six directions aligned with the set of global Cartesian axes; and deforming the current model in a manner which provides low-distortion deformations to the current model in each iteration; wherein the input volumetric representation comprises a polyhedral-mesh representation of the input object, the polyhedral-mesh representation comprising a plurality of notional polyhedrons, each notional polyhedron comprising a corresponding plurality of vertices, a plurality of linear edges that extend between corresponding pairs of vertices and a plurality of polygonal faces defined by corresponding pluralities of edges; and wherein iteratively deforming the current model comprises, in each iteration: for each surface vertex of the current model, determining, by the processor, a surface vertex anchor rotation that would align a normal vector associated with the surface vertex with a corresponding one of the six directions aligned with the set of global Cartesian axes; performing, by the processor, a computational optimization which determines interior rotations for each of the interior vertices of the current model and which is permitted to modify the surface vertex anchor rotations to provide updated surface rotations for each of the surface vertices of the current model; applying, by the processor, the interior rotations to the interior vertices and the updated surface rotations to the surface vertices to determine an iteration output model with new positions for the vertices; and setting the iteration output model to be the current model for the next iteration.