Tile patterning on free-form surfaces that reduces tile cutting

Du C., Van Mele T. and Block P.
Proceedings of the IASS 2023 Symposium
Melbourne
2023

We propose a new strategy for generating staggered patterns for standard, rectangular tiles on free-form surfaces. The given input surface is firstly tessellated into near-square quadrilateral faces using a re-meshing algorithm. Afterwards, we run a matching algorithm that assigns each tile to two adjacent faces. We use binary integer programming to find a tessellation on the surface that minimises the number of unique tiles and tiles that are not staggered. Lastly, we generate the tiles and post-process the tessellation result.