Autocuts: Simultaneous Distortion and Cut Optimization for UV Mapping

publication
ACM SIGGRAPH ASIA 2017
authors
Roi Poranne, Marco Tarini, Sandro Huber, Daniele Panozzo, Olga Sorkine-Hornung

Autocuts: Simultaneous Distortion and Cut Optimization for UV Mapping

Our method produces high quality UV maps, balancing the number of seams and the distortion of the map. The method runs at interactive rates and can provide artists with complete control over the UV map if desired. We offer interactive tools such as bounding boxes for packing islands (left), painting of regions that attract or discourage seam creation, and semi-automatic removal of overlapping regions. Each tool provides interactive feedback, drastically simplifying the design of complex UV maps.

abstract

We propose a UV mapping algorithm that jointly optimizes for cuts and distortion, sidestepping heuristics for placing the cuts. The energy we minimize is a state-of-the-art geometric distortion measure, generalized to take seams into account. Our algorithm is designed to support an interactive workflow: it optimizes UV maps on the fly, while the user can interactively move vertices, cut mesh parts, join seams, separate overlapping regions, and control the placement of the parameterization patches in the UV space. Our UV maps are of high quality in terms of both geometric distortion and cut placement, and compare favorably to those designed with traditional modeling tools. The UV maps can be created in a fraction of the time as existing methods, since our algorithm drastically alleviates the trial-and-error, iterative procedures that plague traditional UV mapping approaches.

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acknowledgments

We would like to thank Mario Botsch, Francis Williams, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions. This work is partially supported by the European Research Council under Grant No.: StG-2012-306877 (ERC Starting Grant iModel), NSF CAREER award (1652515), PRIN project “DSURF” (2015B8TRFM), and a gift from Adobe Research.