A note on preprocessing

This is a small guide on how to preprocess arbitrary meshes in order to use them with our paper "Developability of Triangle Meshes". A similar approach was used to preprocess the meshes for the results that can be seen in Figures 3, 10, 21, 22, 24, 25.

The remeshing tool used is the research code belonging to the paper Instant Field-Aligned Meshes, which can be found on this github page. Download the tool, compile it, start it, and load your mesh to be preprocessed.

1. Set the tool to "Remesh as" Triangles.
2. Enable "extrinsic" as well as "sharp creases", if applicable.
3. Set the "Target vertex count" to a number that produces a reasonably dense mesh. Meshes that are not very dense are deformed more by the method, as can be seen in Fig. 27. If you are not sure which target vertex count to pick, start with about 5000, and then adjust to more or less as needed.
4. Let the tool compute an orientation field. If you want your mesh edges to be aligned along a specific direction (for example, a specific principal curvature direction), use the comb to align the orientation field with a specific direction. Orientation fields aligned with the smaller curvature directions tend to produce great meshes for minimizing a developability energy.
5. Let the tool compute a position field.
6. Click on "Export mesh", and extract the mesh from the position field.
7. Sometimes the resulting mesh can have holes or non-manifold vertices. Remove these in a mesh editor.