Despite high practical demand, algorithmic hexahedral meshing with guarantees on robustness and quality remains unsolved. A promising direction follows the idea of integer-grid maps, which pull back the Cartesian hexahedral grid formed by integer isoplanes from a parametric domain to a surface-conforming hexahedral mesh of the input object. Since directly optimizing for a high-quality integer-grid map is mathematically challenging, the construction is usually split into two steps: (1) generation of a surface-aligned octahedral field and (2) generation of an integer-grid map that best aligns to the octahedral field. The main robustness issue stems from the fact that smooth octahedral fields frequently exhibit singularity graphs that are not appropriate for hexahedral meshing and induce heavily degenerate integer-grid maps. The first contribution of this work is an enumeration of all local configurations that exist in hex meshes with bounded edge valence, and a generalization of the Hopf-Poincaré formula to octahedral fields, leading to necessary local and global conditions for the hex-meshability of an octahedral field in terms of its singularity graph. The second contribution is a novel algorithm to generate octahedral fields with prescribed hex-meshable singularity graphs, which requires the solution of a large nonlinear mixed-integer algebraic system. This algorithm is an important step toward robust automatic hexahedral meshing since it enables the generation of a hex-meshable octahedral field.

Fig. 1. A variety of feature-aligned cross fields computed using our novel cross field formulation. We present a method for designing smooth cross fields on surfaces that automatically align to sharp features of an underlying geometry. Our approach introduces a novel class of energies based on a representation of cross fields in the spherical harmonic basis. We provide theoretical analysis of these energies in the smooth setting, showing that they penalize deviations from surface creases while otherwise promoting intrinsically smooth fields. We demonstrate the applicability of our method to quad-meshing and include an extensive benchmark comparing our fields to other automatic approaches for generating feature-aligned cross fields on triangle meshes. CCS Concepts: • Computing methodologies → Mesh models; Shape analysis.

Recently proposed as a stable means of evaluating geometric compactness, the isoperimetric profile of a planar domain measures the minimum perimeter needed to inscribe a shape with prescribed area varying from 0 to the area of the domain. While this profile has proven valuable for evaluating properties of geographic partitions, existing algorithms for its computation rely on aggressive approximations and are still computationally expensive. In this paper, we propose a practical means of approximating the isoperimetric profile and show that for domains satisfying a "thick neck" condition, our approximation is exact. For more general domains, we show that our bound is still exact within a conservative regime and is otherwise an upper bound. Our method is based on a traversal of the medial axis which produces efficient and robust results. We compare our technique with the state-of-the-art approximation to the isoperimetric profile on a variety of domains and show significantly tighter bounds than were previously achievable.

Much of computer‐generated animation is created by manipulating meshes with rigs. While this approach works well for animating articulated objects like animals, it has limited flexibility for animating less structured free‐form objects. We introduce Wassersplines, a novel trajectory inference method for animating unstructured densities based on recent advances in continuous normalizing flows and optimal transport. The key idea is to train a neurally‐parameterized velocity field that represents the motion between keyframes. Trajectories are then computed by advecting keyframes through the velocity field. We solve an additional Wasserstein barycenter interpolation problem to guarantee strict adherence to keyframes. Our tool can stylize trajectories through a variety of PDE‐based regularizers to create different visual effects. We demonstrate our tool on various keyframe interpolation problems to produce temporally‐coherent animations without meshing or rigging.

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