Developable surface patches bounded by NURBS curves

Abstract

In this paper we construct developable surface patches which are bounded by two rational or NURBS curves, though the resulting patch is not a rational or NURBS surface in general. This is accomplished by reparameterizing one of the boundary curves. The reparameterization function is the solution of an algebraic equation. For the relevant case of cubic or cubic spline curves, this equation is quartic at most, quadratic if the curves are Bézier or splines and lie on parallel planes, and hence it may be solved either by standard analytical or numerical methods.