User controllable anisotropic shape distribution on 3D meshes

This paper presents an automatic method for computing an anisotropic 2D shape distribution on an arbitrary 2-manifold mesh. Our method allows the user to specify the direction as well as the density of the distribution. Using a pre-computed lookup table, our method can efficiently detect collision among the shapes to be distributed on the 3D mesh. In contrast to existing approaches, which usually assume the 2D objects are isotropic and have simple geometry, our method works for complex 2D objects and can guarantee the distribution is conflict-free, which is a critical constraint in many applications. It is able to compute multi-class shape distributions in parallel. Our method does not require global parameterization of the input 3D mesh. Instead, it computes local parameterizations on the fly using geodesic polar coordinates. Thanks to a recent breakthrough in geodesic computation, the local parameterization can be computed at low cost. As a result, our method can be applied to models with complicated geometry and topology. Experimental results on a wide range of 3D models and 2D anisotropic shapes demonstrate the good performance and effectiveness of our method.