Spline Curves and Surfaces

Introduction

This tutorial is designed to help students learn about spline curves and surfaces. It is not designed to be a full lesson; it is more suited to those who have already learnt the basics and would like to reinforce their knowledge.

The tutorial consists of a combination of writing, java applets, VRML worlds and links to other pages. These links are there because the descriptions given elsewhere are likely to be a great help to those learning this material from scratch, as I only give a brief account of the mathematics involved here. The java applets are essentially interactive diagrams. They are there for you to learn by experience, so do experiment!

A note about viewing these pages

In order to see diagrams as large as possible, please maximise your browser window. All of the diagrams on these pages are sized in relation to your window size; if this is too small, the diagrams will be too. It should be possible to resize the window during browsing these pages, but I believe some versions of Netscape do not resize the applets correctly, so choose your window size before you move on.

For some basic notes on how to use the Java applets see the introduction to spline curves. For notes on how to use the VRML worlds see the surface introduction.

Table of Contents


This tutorial was written as an individual project, a required part of the MSc Computing Science degree at Imperial College, by Andy Salter.