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.

The spine of an object is an entity that can characterise the object¿s topology and describes the object by a lower dimension. It has an intuitive appeal for supporting geometric modelling operations. The aim of this paper is to show how a spine for a PDE surface can be generated. For the purpose of the work presented here an analytic solution form for the chosen PDE is utilised. It is shown that the spine of the PDE surface is then computed as a by-product of this analytic solution. This paper also discusses how the of a PDE surface can be used to manipulate the shape. The solution technique adopted here caters for periodic surfaces with general boundary conditions allowing the possibility of the spine based shape manipulation for a wide variety of free-form PDE surface shapes.

An alternative technique for shape morphing using a surface generating method using partial differential equations is outlined throughout this work. The boundaryvalue nature that is inherent to this surface generation technique together with its mathematical properties are hereby exploited for creating intermediate shapes between an initial shape and a final one. Four alternative shape morphing techniques are proposed here. The first one is based on the use of a linear combination of the boundary conditions associated with the initial and final surfaces, the second one consists of varying the Fourier mode for which the PDE is solved whilst the third results from a combination of the first two. The fourth of these alternatives is based on the manipulation of the spine of the surfaces, which is computed as a by-product of the solution. Results of morphing sequences between two topologically nonequivalent surfaces are presented. Thus, it is shown that the PDE based approach for morphing is capable of obtaining smooth intermediate surfaces automatically in most of the methodologies presented in this work and the spine has been revealed as a powerful tool for morphing surfaces arising from the method proposed here.

A method for trimming surfaces generated as solutions to Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) is presented. The work we present here utilises the 2D parameter space on which the trim curves are defined whose projection on the parametrically represented PDE surface is then trimmed out. To do this we define the trim curves to be a set of boundary conditions which enable us to solve a low order elliptic PDE on the parameter space. The chosen elliptic PDE is solved analytically, even in the case of a very general complex trim, allowing the design process to be carried out interactively in real time. To demonstrate the capability for this technique we discuss a series of examples where trimmed PDE surfaces may be applicable.

This paper presents a method to extend PDE surfaces to high dimensional spaces. We review a common existing analytic solution, and show how it can be used straightforwardly to increase the dimension of the space the surface is embedded within. We then further develop a numerical scheme suitable for increasing the number of variables that parametrise the surface, and investigate some of the properties of this solution with a view to future work.

This paper extends the PDE method of surface generation. The governing partial differential equation is generalised to sixth order to increase its flexibility. The PDE is solved analytically, even in the case of general boundary conditions, making the method fast. The boundary conditions, which control the surface shape, are specified interactively, allowing intuitive manipulation of generic shapes. A compact user interface is presented which makes use of direct manipulation and other techniques for 3D interaction.