Sketching subdivision surfaces

We describe a 3D modeling system that combines subdivision surfaces with sketch-based modeling in order to meet two conflicting goals: ease of use and fine-grained shape control. For the excellent control, low-poly modeling is still the method of choice for creating high-quality 3D models, e.g., in the games industry. However, direct mesh editing can be very tedious and time consuming. Our idea is to include also stroke-based techniques for rapidly modeling regular surface parts. We propose a simple and efficient algorithm for converting a 2D stroke to a control polygon suitable for Catmull/Clark subdivision surfaces. We have realized a small but reasonably rich set of interactive modeling tools to assess the expressiveness of stroke-based mesh design with a number of examples.