In this paper we present a method for generating Bézier surfaces from the boundary information based on a general 4th-order PDE. This is a generalisation of our previous work on harmonic and biharmonic Bézier surfaces whereby we studied the Bézier solutions for Laplace and the standard biharmonic equation, respectively. Here we study the Bézier solutions of the Euler¿Lagrange equation associated with the most general quadratic functional. We show that there is a large class of fourth-order operators for which Bézier solutions exist and hence we show that such operators can be utilised to generate Bézier surfaces from the boundary information. As part of this work we present a general method for generating these Bézier surfaces. Furthermore, we show that some of the existing techniques for boundary based surface design, such as Coons patches and Bloor¿Wilson PDE method, are indeed particular cases of the generalised framework we present here.

This paper presents a methodology for efficient shape parametrisation for automatic design optimisation using a partial differential equation (PDE) formulation. It is shown how the choice of an elliptic PDE enables one to define and parametrise geometries corresponding to complex shapes. By using the PDE formulation it is shown how the shape definition and parametrisation can be based on a boundary value approach by which complex shapes can be created and parametrised based on the shape information at the boundaries or the character lines defining the shape. Furthermore, this approach to shape definition allows complex shapes to be parametrised intuitively using a very small set of design parameters.

Manipulation of PDE surfaces using a set of interactively defined parameters is considered. The PDE method treats surface design as a boundary-value problem and ensures that surfaces can be defined using an appropriately chosen set of boundary conditions and design parameters. Here we show how the data input to the system, from a user interface such as the mouse of a computer terminal, can be efficiently used to define a set of parameters with which to manipulate the surface interactively in real time.

Given a prescribed boundary of a Bezier surface we compare the Bezier surfaces generated by two different methods, i.e. the Bezier surface minimising the Biharmonic functional and the unique Bezier surface solution of the Biharmonic equation with prescribed boundary. Although often the two types of surfaces look visually the same, we show that they are indeed different. In this paper we provide a theoretical argument showing why the two types of surfaces are not always the same.

We present an efficient method for reconstructing complex geometry using an elliptic Partial Differential Equation (PDE) formulation. The integral part of this work is the use of three-dimensional curves within the physical space which act as boundary conditions to solve the PDE. The chosen PDE is solved explicitly for a given general set of curves representing the original shape and thus making the method very efficient. In order to improve the quality of results for shape representation we utilize an automatic parameterization scheme on the chosen curves. With this formulation we discuss our methodology for shape representation using a series of practical examples.