Variable-radius blending of parametric surfaces

The radius blend is a popular surface blending because of its geometric simplicity. A radius blend can be seen as the envelope of a rolling sphere or sweeping circle that centers on a spine curve and touches the surface to be blended along the linkage curves. For a given pair of base surfaces in parametric form, a reference curve, and a radius function of the rolling sphere, we present an exact representation for the variable-radius spine curve and propose a marching procedure. We describe methods that use the derived spine curve and linkage curves to compute a parametric form of the variable-radius spherical and circular blends.