Application on NURBS

Computer Aided Geometric Design (CAGD) and Visualization play an important role in the construction of such varied products as cars, ships, airplanes etc. A practical implementation has to balance two conflicting goals, namely efficiency and reliability. Typically, a numerical algorithm is efficient, but it is not reliable and may fail in certain cases, especially in areas near the singularities. On the other hand, algorithms based on exact arithmetic are reliable, but are normally slow and require a lot of memory space. Perhaps the goals of efficiency and reliability cannot be met simultaneously without some compromises.
 

NURBS at RISC

At RISC-Linz the system CASA  for Computer Algebra and Computational Algebraic Geometry has been developed over the last 7 years and extentions are still made. Recently the  CGAL Project (Computational Geometry Algorithms Library) was started.

More information about this topic can be found on the  RISC-NURBS page.
 

The goal of the project is to design and implement a robust, easy to use, and efficient C++ software library of geometric algorithms. The library is developed by the research institutes in close collaboration with the industrial partners.
Information on the contributions of RISC-Linz to the CGAL project can be found on the local CGAL pages.

The CGAL Application Module on NURBS is still under construction at RISC-Linz and is not yet publically available as part of a release of CGAL. Classes for NURBS curves and surfaces were implemented and tested, and used for experiments in the frame of the work described on this page. The latest version of the source code we used (and which will become part of the CGAL Application Module on NURBS in the near future) can be downloaded here, as well as some test programmes and a preliminary version of the documentation for the Application Module.
CGAL_NURBS source code
Tests and Demos
Documentation