NURBS++ library FAQ v0.1

This FAQ answers questions about my NURBS library and NURBS in general.

Table of Contents:
  1. General questions about NURBS
	1.1 What is a NURBS ?
	1.2 Where can I find good books about NURBS ?

  2. General questions about the NURBS++ package
	2.1 What is NURBS++ ?
	2.2 Where can I get it ?

                      
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Section 1: General questions about NURBS




1.1 What is a NURBS ?

  NURBS is an acronyme for Non-Uniform Rational B-Spline. It is used to
  represent a shape parametrically. Unlike B-Splines, it can represent
  conic shape such as circles without any errors. They are heavily used
  in computer graphics and the CAD/CAM industry to represent free-form
  shapes.

  Normally NURBS are used to represent a curve or a surface but
  you can also represent hypersurfaces with them.

  I wrote a small introduction to NURBS. It explains the mathematics
  behind them and how they are related to their more specialized cousin
  the B-Spline. This introduction is available from the web at

  http://yukon.genie.uottawa.ca/~lavoie/software/nurbs/nurbsintro.pdf




1.1 Where can I find good books about NURBS ?

  As far as I know, the best reference for NURBS is the book

        The NURBS Book
        Les Piegl and Wayne Tiller
        Springer, 1995
        ISBN 3-540-55069-0

  There are also books which discuss splines in general. Here are a few
  suggestions.

        Curves and Surfaces for Computer Aided Geometric Design 
                - A Practical Guide
        Gerald Farin
        Academic Press

        Mathematical Elements for Computer Graphics
        David F. Rogers, J. Alan Adams
        McGraw-Hill

        Fundamentals of Computer Aided Geometric Design
        Dieter Lasser, Josef Hoschek 
        A K Peters

        Computer Graphics -- Principles and Practice, second edition
        Foley, van Dam, Feiner, Hughes
        Addison-Wesley


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Section 2: General questions about the NURBS++ package.




2.1 What is NURBS++?

  As the name implies, it's a C++ library created for the manipulation
  of NURBS curves and surfaces. The core of the package is composed of
  a NURBS library, a matrix library, an image library and a numerical
  library. The matrix library offers the basic mathematical operations
  used by all the other libraries. The image library offers image
  manipulation routines, the numerical library offers least squares
  fitting, SVD and statistical functions. The NURBS library contains
  the NURBS related classes and also contains a Triangular B-Spline
  class. 

  The library offers many function to manipulate NURBS objects and also
  to display them using OpenGL, VRML or Post-Script. Also it is
  templated so it's easy to have either a float and a double
  precision library.

  You can find a full list of the features available from this library
  in another part of the FAQ (to be added).

2.2 Where can I get it ?

  You can get the library from the web at
        http://yukon.genie.uottawa.ca/~lavoie/software/nurbs