Directional field synthesis, design, and processing

Direction fields and vector fields play an increasingly important role in computer graphics and geometry processing. The synthesis of directional fields on surfaces, or other spatial domains, is a fundamental step in numerous applications, such as mesh generation, deformation, texture mapping, and many more. The wide range of applications resulted in definitions for many types of directional fields: from vector and tensor fields, over line and cross fields, to frame and vector-set fields. Depending on the application at hand, researchers have used various notions of objectives and constraints to synthesize such fields. These notions are defined in terms of fairness, feature alignment, symmetry, or field topology, to mention just a few. To facilitate these objectives, various representations, discretizations, and optimization strategies have been developed. These choices come with varying strengths and weaknesses. This report provides a systematic overview of directional field synthesis for graphics applications, the challenges it poses, and the methods developed in recent years to address these challenges.