New method for the preservation of UV coordinates in the remeshing process: application to footwear design

Abstract

Polygon meshes are a key element in computer-aided design (CAD). When working with this type of geometry, the simplification or reduction of polygons in the meshes is a very common operation for working with complex objects, but with a low density of polygons. These techniques are fundamental to be able to use CAD systems in an industrial environment that offer quality and optimisation of processes to make them viable for production and market times. However, these operations cause that some information of the original mesh is not maintained in the refined ones or is altered reflecting artifacts in the working mesh. This paper presents a new method for the preservation of texture coordinate information (also called UV coordinates or UV parameterization, so they are usually stored in a 2D matrix, U for rows and V for columns) between different refined meshes based on the original mesh information. It is a method that manages to imitate with a high degree of accuracy the original texturing information, event on meshes with a high level of simplification, regardless of the initial texture, which makes it especially fast even with high-definition textures. We demonstrate the performance of the approach on real elements used in the footwear industry.