EQUIVALENCE OF TOPOLOGICAL FORM FOR CURVILINEAR GEOMETRIC OBJECTS

Given a curvilinear geometric object in R3, made up of properly-joined parametric patches defined in terms of control points, it is of interest to know under what conditions the object will retain its original topological form when the control points are perturbed. For example, the patches might be triangular Bézier surface patches, and the geometric object may represent the boundary of a solid in a solid-modeling application. In this paper we give sufficient conditions guaranteeing that topological form is preserved by an ambient isotopy. The main conditions to be satisfied are that the original object should be continuously perturbed in a way that introduces no self-intersections of any patch, and such that the patches remain properly joined. The patches need only have C0 continuity along the boundaries joining adjacent patches. The results apply directly to most surface modeling schemes, and they are of interest in several areas of application.