Navigation meshes are a widely used method for representing the world geometry in a format that can be used by pathfinding algorithms. Frequently used navigation mesh generation algorithms first discretize the input ge- ometry into a grid of voxels and then reconstruct the mesh out of them. This benefits the simplicity and performance of the algorithm, but comes with drawbacks. If the voxels are too large, the navigation mesh is not precise enough and may even have some pathways missing. If the voxels are too small, creation of the mesh takes too long. In this thesis we propose and implement an algorithm that creates a navigation mesh directly from the input geometry without using an intermediate voxel representation. This allows us to preserve original detail where required and results in a more precise navigation mesh. 1

No / Geometric modelling using Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) has been gradually recognised due to its smooth instinct, as well as the ability to generate a variety of geometric shapes by intuitively manipulating a relatively small set of PDE boundary curves. In this paper we explore and demonstrate the feasibility of the PDE method in facial geometry parameterisation. The geometry of a generic face is approximated by evaluating spectral solutions to a group of fourth order elliptic PDEs. Our PDE-based parameterisation scheme can produce and animate a high-resolution 3D face with a relatively small number of parameters. By taking advantage of parametric representation, the PDE method can use one fixed animation scheme to manipulate the facial geometry in varying Levels of Detail (LODs), without any further process.

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This dissertation presents useful nonlinear models for fluid forcing on a moving body in two distinct contexts, and methods for analyzing the geometric structure within those and other mathematical models. This manuscript style dissertation presents three works within the theme of understanding fluid forcing and geometric structure. When a bluff body is free to move in the presence of an incoming bluff body wake, the average forcing on the body is dependent on its position relative to the upstream bluff body. This position-dependent forcing can be conceptualized as a stiffness, much like a spring. This work presents an updated model for the quasi-steady fluid forcing of a wake and extends the notion of wake stiffness to consider a nonlinear spring. These results are compared with kinematic experimental results to provide an example of the application of this framework. Fluid force models also play a role in understanding the behavior of passive aerodynamic gliders, such as gliding animals or plant material. The forces a glider experiences depend on the angle that its body makes with respect to its direction of motion. Modeling the glider as capable of pitch control, this work considers a glider with a fixed angle with respect to the ground. Within this model, all trajectories in velocity space collapse to a 1-dimensional invariant manifold known as the terminal velocity manifold. This work presents methods to identify the terminal velocity manifold, investigates its properties, and extends it to a 2-dimensional invariant manifold in a 3-dimensional space. Finally, in the search for manifolds such as the terminal velocity manifold, this dissertation introduces a new diagnostic for identifying the low dimensional geometric structure of models. The trajectory divergence rate uses instantaneous vector field information to identify regions of large normal stretching and strong normal convergence between nearby invariant manifolds. This work lays out the mathematical basis of the trajectory divergence rate and shows its application to approximate a variety of structures including slow manifolds and Lagrangian coherent structures. This dissertation applies nonlinear theoretical and numerical techniques to analyze models of fluid forcing and their geometric structure. The tools developed in this dissertation lay the groundwork for future research in the fields of flow-induced vibration, plant and animal biomechanics, and dynamical systems. / Ph. D. / When an object moves through a fluid such as air or water, the motion of the surrounding fluid generates forces on the moving object, affecting its motion. The moving object, in turn, affects the motion of the surrounding fluid. This interaction is complicated, nonlinear, and hard to even simulate numerically. This dissertation aims to analyze simplified models for these interactions in a way that gives a deeper understanding of the physics of the interaction between an object and a surrounding fluid. In order to understand these interactions, this dissertation looks at the geometric structure of the models. Very often, there are low-dimensional points, curves, or surfaces which have a very strong effect on the behavior of the system. The search for these geometric structures is another key theme of this dissertation. This dissertation presents three independent studies, with an introduction and conclusion to discuss the overall themes. The first work focuses on the forces acting on a cylinder in the wake of another cylinder. These forces are important to understand, because the vibrations that arise from wake forcing are important to consider when designing bridges, power cables, or pipes to carry oil from the ocean floor to offshore oil platforms. Previous studies have shown that the wake of a circular cylinder acts like a spring, pulling harder on the downstream cylinder the more it is moved from the center of the wake. In this work, I extend this idea of the wake as a spring to consider a nonlinear spring, which keeps the same idea, but provides a more accurate representation of the forces involved. The second work considers a simple model of gliding flight, relevant to understanding the behavior of gliding animals, falling leaves, or passive engineered gliders. Within this model, a key geometric feature exists on which the majority of the motion of the glider occurs, representing a 2-dimensional analogy to terminal velocity. In this work, I study the properties of this influential curve, show several ways to identify it, and extend the idea to a surface in a 3-dimensional model. The third study of this dissertation introduces a new mathematical quantity for studying models of systems, for fluid-body interaction problems, ocean flows, chemical reactions, or any other system that can be modeled as a vector field. This quantity, the trajectory divergence rate, provides an easily computed measurement of highly attracting or repelling regions of the states of a model, which can be used to identify influential geometric structures. This work introduces the quantity, discusses its properties, and shows its application to a variety of systems.

A classic problem Computational Geometry is finding all euclidean shortest paths in a simple polygon from a given source vertex to every other vertex in the boundary. In this text, we give a detailed description of the Visibility Graph and Shortest Path Tree structures that solve this problem and also present the Shortest Path Map structure that extends the solution to shortest paths to every point inside the polygon. / Um problema clássico em Geometria Computacional é: encontrar todos os caminhos mínimos euclidianos dentro de um polígono simples a partir de um dado vértice fonte para todos os outros vértices da borda. Neste texto, apresentamos detalhadamente as estruturas de Grafo de Visibilidade e Árvore de Caminhos Mínimos que resolvem este problema e descrevemos também a estrutura Mapa de Caminhos Mínimos que estende a solução para todos os pontos contidos dentro do polígono.

L'analyse des techniques d'approximation est centrale en géométrie algorithmique, pour des raisons pratiques comme théoriques. Dans cette thèse nous traitons de l'échantillonnage des structures géométriques et des algorithmes d'approximation géométriques en optimisation combinatoire. La première partie est consacrée à la combinatoire des hypergraphes. Nous débutons par les problèmes de packing, dont des extensions d'un lemme de Haussler, particulièrement le lemme dit de Shallow packing, pour lequel nous donnons aussi un minorant optimal, conjecturé mais pas établi dans les travaux antérieurs. Puis nous appliquons ledit lemme, avec la méthode de partition polynomiale récemment introduite, à l'étude d'un analogue combinatoire des régions de Macbeath de la géométrie convexe : les M-réseaux, pour lesquels nous unifions les résultats d'existence et majorations existants, et donnons aussi quelques minorants. Nous illustrons leur relation aux epsilon-réseaux, structures incontournables en géométrie combinatoire et algorithmique, notamment en observant que les majorants de Chan et al. (SODA 2012) ou Varadarajan (STOC 2010) pour les epsilon-réseaux (uniformes) découlent directement de nos résultats sur les M-réseaux. La deuxième partie traite des techniques de recherche locale appliquées aux restrictions géométriques de problèmes classiques d'optimisation combinatoire. En dix ans, ces techniques ont produit les premiers schémas d'approximation en temps polynomial pour divers problèmes tels que celui de calculer un plus petit ensemble intersectant pour un ensemble de disques donnés en entrée parmi un ensemble de points donnés en entrée. En fait, il a été montré que pour de nombreux tels problèmes, la recherche locale de rayon Θ (1/epsilon²) donne une (1 + epsilon)-approximation en temps n^{O(1/epsilon²)}. Savoir si l'exposant de n pouvait être ramené à o (1/epsilon²) demeurait une question ouverte. Nous répondons par la négative : la garantie d'approximation de la recherche locale n'est améliorable pour aucun desdits problèmes / The analysis of approximation techniques is a key topic in computational geometry, both for practical and theoretical reasons. In this thesis we discuss sampling tools for geometric structures and geometric approximation algorithms in combinatorial optimization. Part I focuses on the combinatorics of geometric set systems. We start by discussing packing problems in set systems, including extensions of a lemma of Haussler, mainly the so-called shallow packing lemma. For said lemma we also give an optimal lower bound that had been conjectured but not established in previous work on the topic. Then we use this lemma, together with the recently introduced polynomial partitioning technique, to study a combinatorial analogue of the Macbeath regions from convex geometry: Mnets, for which we unify previous existence results and upper bounds, and also give some lower bounds. We highlight their connection with epsilon-nets, staples of computational and combinatorial geometry, for example by observing that the unweighted epsilon-net bound of Chan et al. (SODA 2012) or Varadarajan (STOC 2010) follows directly from our results on Mnets. Part II deals with local-search techniques applied to geometric restrictions of classical combinatorial optimization problems. Over the last ten years such techniques have produced the first polynomial-time approximation schemes for various problems, such as that of computing a minimum-sized hitting set for a collection of input disks from a set of input points. In fact, it was shown that for many of these problems, local search with radius Θ(1/epsilon²) gives a (1 + epsilon)-approximation with running time n^{O(1/epsilon²)}. However the question of whether the exponent of n could be decreased to o(1/epsilon²) was left open. We answer it in the negative: the approximation guarantee of local search cannot be improved for any of these problems. The key ingredient is a new lower bound on locally expanding planar graphs, which is then used to show the impossibility results

Le développement de la numérisation systématique des formes 3D (conservation du patrimoine national, commerce électronique, reverse engineering, intégration d’objets réels dans des environnements de réalité virtuelle) et le besoin toujours croissant de ces objets géométriques dans de nombreuses applications (conception assistée par ordinateur, calcul de simulations par éléments finis, système d’informations géographiques, loisirs numériques) a entrainé une augmentation vertigineuse du volume de données à traiter, avec l’émergence de nombreuses méthodes de compression de modèles 3D. Ce volume de données devient encore plus difficile à maitriser lorsque l’aspect temporel entre en jeu. Les maillages correspondent au modèle classiquement utilisé pour modéliser les formes numérisées et certaines approches de compression exploitent la propriété qu’une bonne estimation de la connectivité peut être déduite de l’échantillonnage, lorsque ce dernier s’avère suffisamment dense. La compression de la connectivité d’un maillage revient alors au codage de l’écart entre deux connectivités proches. Dans ce mémoire, nous nous intéressons au codage compact de cette différence pour des maillages surfaciques. Nos travaux sont fondés sur l’utilisation de la bascule d’arête (edge flip) et l’étude de ses propriétés. Nos contributions sont les suivantes. Etant donné deux triangulations connexes partageant le même nombre de sommets et un même genre topologique, nous proposons un algorithme direct et efficace pour générer une séquence de bascules d’arêtes permettant de passer d’un maillage `a un autre. Nous nous appuyons sur une correspondance entre les sommets des deux maillages, qui, si elle est non fournie, peut être choisie de manière totalement aléatoire / The development of scanning 3D shapes (national heritage conservation, ecommerce, reverse engineering, virtual reality environments) and the growing need for geometric objects in many applications (computer-aided design, simulations, geographic information systems, digital entertainment) have led to a dramatic increase in the volume of data to be processed, and the emergence of many methods of compression of 3D models. This volume of data becomes even more difficult to control when the temporal aspect comes in. Meshes correspond to the pattern typically used to model the scanned forms and some approaches exploit a property of compression that a good estimation of connectivity can be derived from sampling, when it appears sufficiently dense. Compressing the connectivity of a mesh is equivalent to coding the difference between two close connectivities. In this thesis, we focus on the compact coding of this difference for 2-dimensional meshes. Our work is based on the use and study of the properties of the edge flip. Our contributions are the following : - Given two connected triangulations that share the same number of vertices and the same topological genus, we propose a direct and efficient algorithm to generate a sequence of edge flips to change one mesh into the other. We rely on a correspondence between the vertices of the two meshes, which, if not provided, may be chosen randomly. The validity of the algorithm is based on the fact that we intend to work in a triangulation of a different class from those generally used. - We then generalize the edge flips to triangulations in which we identify each edge with a label. We show that a sequence of edge flips can be used to transpose two labels, under certain conditions. From this result, the edge flip can be generalized to meshes whose faces are not necessarily triangular, which allowed us to develop an algorithm for reducing sequences of edge flips. - Finally, we present a compact coding approach for a sequence of edge flips, and determine under what conditions it is better to use this compact transformation between two connectivities instead of coding them independently by a static algorithm

Esta tese teve como objetivo estudar problemas cinéticos de clustering, ou seja, problemas de clustering nos quais os objetos se movimentam. O trabalho se concentrou no caso unidimensional, em que os objetos são pontos se movendo na reta real. Diversas variantes desse caso foram abordadas. Em termos do movimento, consideramos o caso em que cada ponto se move com uma velocidade constante num dado intervalo de tempo, o caso em que os pontos se movem arbitrariamente e temos apenas as suas posições em instantes discretos de tempo, o caso em que os pontos se movem com uma velocidade aleatória em que se conhece apenas o valor esperado da velocidade, e o caso em que, dada uma partição do intervalo de tempo, os pontos se movem com velocidades constantes em cada subintervalo. Em termos do tipo de clustering buscado, nos concentramos no caso em que o número de clusters é um dado do problema e consideramos diferentes medidas de qualidade para o clustering. Duas delas são tradicionais para problemas de clustering: a soma dos diâmetros dos clusters e o diâmetro máximo de um cluster. A terceira medida considerada leva em conta a característica cinética do problema, e permite, de uma maneira controlada, que o clustering mude com o tempo. Para cada uma das variantes do problema, são apresentados algoritmos, exatos ou de aproximação, alguns resultados de complexidade obtidos, e questões que ficaram em aberto. / This work aimed to study kinetic problems of clustering, i.e., clustering problems in which the objects are moving. The study focused on the unidimensional case, where the objects are points moving on the real line. Several variants of this case have been discussed. Regarding the movement, we consider the case where each point moves at a constant velocity in a given time interval, the case where the points move arbitrarily and we only know their positions in discrete time instants, the case where the points move at a random velocity in which only the expected value of the velocity is known, and the case where, given a partition of the time interval, the points move at constant velocities in each sub-interval. Regarding the kind of clustering sought, we focused in the case where the number of clusters is part of the input of the problem and we consider different measures of quality for the clustering. Two of them are traditional measures for clustering problems: the sum of the cluster diameters and the maximum diameter of a cluster. The third measure considered takes into account the kinetic characteristic of the problem, and allows, in a controlled manner, that a cluster change along time. For each of the variants of the problem, we present algorithms, exact or approximation, some obtained complexity results, and open questions.

Dois métodos distintos são descritos e implementados. O primeiro método, proposto por Ruppert, possui garantias teóricas de qualidade quando a fronteira do domínio obedece certas restrições. O segundo método, proposto por Persson, possibilita um maior controle na densidade dos elementos que discretizam o domínio. As vantagens, desvantagens e particularidades de cada um dos métodos são descritas e detalhadas / Two distinct methods are described and implemented. The first method, proposed by Ruppert, has theoretical guarantees on the quality of elements when the domain boundaries respect certain restrictions. The second method, proposed by Persson, makes it possible to have greater control over the density of the elements that make up the domain. The advantages, disadvantages and specific points about each method are described and detailed

[pt] O estudo computacional de uniões de bolas possui aplicações em diversas áreas da Matemática. O objetivo principal deste trabalho é propor uma simplificação de união de bolas em R2 através de um movimento que obedece as direções do eixo medial, procurando preservar os grandes elementos geométricos da união de bolas. A desconexão ou não das formas é um aspecto essencial da evolução. Em alguns casos, pode significar uma divisão importante do objeto. Em outros, pode ser indesejada, pois gostaríamos de ter uma versão conexa simplificada da forma. / [en] The computational study of unions of balls has applications in several domains of the Mathematics. The purpose of this dissertation is to propose a simplification of the union of balls in R2 through a movement that obeys the direction of the medial axis in order to simplify it, maintaining the major geometric elements of its shape. The disconnection of the shape is an essential property of the evolution. In some cases, it could mean an important division of the object. In others, it may be undesirable because we would like to have a simplified version connected of this shape.