Thesis (M. Phil.)--Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 83-86). Also available in electronic version. Access restricted to campus users.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 139-150). Also available in electronic version. Access restricted to campus users.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 114-123).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2000. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 89-95). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hong Kong, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 167-179).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2003. / Title from first page of PDF file. Document formatted into pages; contains xiii, 102 p.: ill. (some col.). Includes abstract and vita. Advisor: Roger A. Crawfis, Dept. of Computer and Information Science. Includes bibliographical references (p. 98-102).

Thesis (M. Phil.)--Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 123-127). Also available in electronic version. Access restricted to campus users.

Surface tiling, as well as its counterpart in 3D, i.e. volume tiling, is a fundamental research problem in the subject of computer graphics and geometric modeling, which has found applications in numerous areas, such as computer-aided design (CAD), physical simulation, realtime rendering and architectural modeling. The objective of surface tiling is to compute discrete mesh representations for given surfaces which are often required to possess some desirable geometric properties. Likewise, volume tiling focuses on the study of discretizing a given 3D volume with complex boundary into a set of high-quality volumetric elements. This thesis starts with the study of computing optimal sampling for parametric surfaces, that is, decompose the surface into quad patches such that 1) each quad patch should have their sides with equal length; and 2) the shapes and sizes of all the quad patches should be the same as much as possible. Then, the similar idea is applied to the discrete case, i.e. optimizing the face elements of a quad mesh surface with the goal of making it possess, as much as possible, face elements of desired shapes and sizes. This thesis further studies the computation of hexagonal tiling on free-form surfaces, where the planarity of the faces is more concerned. Free-form meshes with planar hexagonal faces, to be called P-Hex meshes, provide a useful surface representation in discrete differential geometry and are demanded in architectural design for representing surfaces built with planar glass/metal panels. We study the geometry of P-Hex meshes and present an algorithm for computing a free-form P-Hex mesh of a specified shape. Lastly, this thesis progresses to 3D volume case and proposes an automatic method for generating boundary-aligned all-hexahedron meshes with high quality, which possess nice numerical properties, such as a reduced number of elements and high approximation accuracy in physical simulation and mechanical engineering. / published_or_final_version / Computer Science / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

Modeling and interactive rendering of urban environments are difficult as it is telling the story of simulating our real and complex world. Urban environment contains various buildings with different kinds of materials and different shapes, modeling such objects with conventional triangle mesh are not reasonable. It's not difficult to create the models, but to store and transmit the enormous data caused by the mesh models. Such amount of data is also very difficult to be put into computer memory for realtime rendering. Besides, roads and trees are also important parts of an urban environment. It is obvious that they share almost the same complexity of modeling and rendering with buildings due to similar problems. Therefore realtime interactive rendering with good visualization quality is very difficult to achieve. In this thesis, we are going to introduce various techniques for different objects in an urban environment to overcome mentioned problems. The first part of this thesis introduces a compact representation of urban building models called Non-uniform Texture, NUT for short. The representation is able to model a building with memory footprint more than two orders of magnitude smaller than that of its mesh counterpart, while impressive details and rendering performance are preserved. The second part introduces a compact representation of urban roads. The representation is also very efficient in data storage and memory consumption. Combing with NUT, the representation also offers great visual quality. The third part introduces an efficient rendering pipeline of trees. The pipeline requires no details to be stored to achieve data efficiency. The pipeline uses almost all functionality of mainstream GPU to provide stunning visual and rendering performance. The final part of this thesis introduces a robust computation of up vector, to solve the problem of camera rotation during video capture. With all the mentioned features, we are going to produce a living urban environment within one system. / published_or_final_version / Computer Science / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / abstract / Mechanical Engineering / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy