A survey of curve and surface methods in CAGD (Q1083171)

CAGD - short for Computer Aided Geometric Design - is concerned with the approximation and representation of curves and surfaces that arise when these objects have to be processed by a computer. Designing curves and surfaces plays an important role in the construction of quite different products such as car bodies, ship hulls, airplane fuselages and wings, propeller blades, shoe insoles, bottles, etc, etc, but also in the description of geological, physical and even medical phenomena. In this survey we mainly present methods for the generation of curves and surfaces, not for subsequent operations such as viewing, intersections, etc. Also not covered are generation methods that construct curves and surfaces from other such objects, such as fillet curves/surfaces, offset curves/surfaces etc.