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BEYOND NURBS -
NEW FREE-FORM SURFACE REPRESENTATIONS FOR THE NEW CENTURY
M Sabin
Numerical Geometry Ltd
Cambridge
UK
NURBS are just a quarter of a century old. They were invented as a way of taking benefit from computers that could actually hold a few tens of Kilobytes in real memory. They took over because they gave axis-independence, and because their use significantly de-skilled the surface definition process. They took over from conic-lofting methods which had themselves been devised in the 1930's to exploit the ability of desk calculators to take a square root in about a second, and which released surface interrogation from the (in)accuracy limits of the loftsman's pencil. We now routinely use computers with ten thousand times as much memory, and there are surface definition and interrogation techniques available which can exploit that memory and thereby offer the ability to define better surfaces more easily, coupled with faster operation and much greater robustness. Some commercial companies are starting to offer these surfaces as options within their products. We should expect rapid changes in the next couple of years.