Stripe patterns on surfaces

Stripe patterns are ubiquitous in nature, describing macroscopic phenomena such as stripes on plants and animals, down to material impurities on the atomic scale. We propose a method for synthesizing stripe patterns on triangulated surfaces, where singularities are automatically inserted in order to achieve user-specified orientation and line spacing. Patterns are characterized as global minimizers of a convex-quadratic energy which is well-defined in the smooth setting. Computation amounts to finding the principal eigenvector of a symmetric positive-definite matrix with the same sparsity as the standard graph Laplacian. The resulting patterns are globally continuous, and can be applied to a variety of tasks in design and texture synthesis.