PUSHKAR JOSHI

By computing the energy minimizers for a number of canonical input shapes, we provide a catalog of diverse functionals that span a reasonable domain of aesthetic styles. The functionals can be linearly combined to obtain new functionals with intermediate aesthetic styles. Our side-by-side tabular comparison of functionals helps to develop an intuition for the preferred aesthetic styles of the functionals and to predict the aesthetic styles preferred by a new combination of the functionals... To compare the shapes preferred by the functionals, we built a robust surface optimization system. We represent shapes using Catmull--Clark subdivision surfaces, with the control mesh vertices acting as degrees of freedom for the optimization. The energy is minimized by an off-the-shelf implementation of a quasi-Newton method. We discuss some future work for further improving the optimization system and end with some conclusions on the use of optimization for aesthetic design... We introduce web..