Almost Hamiltonian Traversal and Vine Growh

 

This is the final project that I'd made for my Computer Graphics class (team of 2). Using the RINGEXPANDER algorithm from LR: Compact Connectivity representation for triangle meshes (http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1964962), we performed an almost Hamiltonian traversal of a mesh, and from the triangles visited, drew an animated growing vine.


The key takeaways were:

1. The triangles visited from a root triangle are either to the left (L triangle) or the right (R triangle) of the root triangle. This yields a tree structure, similar to L-systems (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L-system) used for procedurally modeling plants.
2. Vines flow, instead of branches being straight lines. A spline would be a good approximation of the path taken by the vines. We used Catmull-Rom splines for our branches, which, being interpolating, closely follow our node points .

 Here's the system in action on a horse mesh: