Dimensions of spline spaces over T-meshes

A T-mesh is basically a rectangular grid that allows T-junctions. In this paper, we propose a method based on Bezier nets to calculate the dimension of a spline function space over a T-mesh. When the order of the smoothness is less than half of the degree of the spline functions, a dimension formula is derived which involves only the topological quantities of the T-mesh. The construction of basis functions is briefly discussed. Furthermore, the dimension formulae for T-meshes after mesh operations, such as edge insertion and mesh merging, are also obtained. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.