Swept Surface Synthesis With Visibility

The visibility of a surface has wide applications in manufacturing, where accessibility of the workpiece to the processing agent is of critical importance. A surface is visible to a direction $d$ if for every point on the surface a line-of-sight can be established along $d.$ Important applications, such as die-face design, arise in manufacturing where surfaces must be constructed visible to a given direction. In this paper we present a family of swept surfaces with built-in visibility. In particular, methods are laid out to build translational, rotational and spined sweeps visible to a given direction by sweeping monotone section curves. In these methods, minimal limitations are imposed besides those needed to avoid surface singularities. To increase modeling flexibility, the methods are extended to sweeps with distinct end sections and nonuniform scaling functions. [S1087-1357(00)00103-9]