SeamCut: interactive mesh segmentation for parameterization

Mesh parameterization consists in unwrapping mesh regions having the topology of a disk onto the 2D plane. This geometry process is fundamental for 2D texture mapping and instrumental for a number of surface analysis primitives. Typically, users execute automatic unwrapping algorithms on handmade disk-like patches, whose design, often called "seaming" induces a massive amount of tedious manual actions to select the edges of the mesh that eventually form the regions boundaries i.e., the seams. We propose SeamCut, an analytic and interactive segmentation framework to build an organized set of curves, cuts and seams, prior to surface parameterization. While the cuts are in charge of dividing the mesh in semantic parts, the seams aim at minimizing parameterization distortion. To tailor them, our method analyzes the surface geometry using only sparse high level interactions on the surface, where we adopt a field-based approach to generate the curves independently of the actual connectivity of the mesh. Once stable, the curve set may be used to remesh the input or snapped to the mesh edges, giving rise to a consistent mesh segmentation ready for automatic parameterization. We evaluate our live surface analysis system on a variety of models and report interactive performances.