SQuadGen: Generating Simple Quad Layouts via Chart Distance Fields

2026-04-29

AI Summary

Existing quadrilateral remeshing methods often struggle to produce clean, regular layouts, frequently yielding irregular loops and requiring extensive manual intervention. To address this limitation, this work proposes SQuadGen—a diffusion-based framework for generating structured quadrilateral layouts. The key innovations include the introduction of a continuous chart distance field (CDF) representation to overcome the discrete nature of mesh connectivity, the construction of the first large-scale dataset of clean quadrilateral layouts, and the design of a loop-aware regularity metric to guide the generation process. Coupled with a robust quadrilateral recovery pipeline, SQuadGen consistently produces high-quality, artist-friendly quad meshes across a diverse range of 3D shapes, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art methods.

Abstract

3D shapes from scanning, reconstruction, or AI-generated content often lack simple quad mesh layouts -- critical for efficient editing and modeling. Existing quad-remeshing techniques typically produce complex layouts with irregular loops, leading to tedious manual cleanup and extensive algorithm tuning. We introduce SQuadGen, a diffusion-based generative framework that leverages Chart Distance Fields (CDF) to synthesize simple quad layouts on 3D shapes. Our approach addresses two key challenges: (1) the discrete nature of mesh connectivity, which hinders learning, and (2) the scarcity of large-scale datasets with simple quad meshes. To overcome the first, we propose CDF, a continuous surface-based representation enabling effective learning and synthesis of quad layouts. To address the second, we define loop-aware simplicity metrics and construct a large-scale dataset of high-quality quad layouts recovered from public 3D repositories through a robust quad-recovery pipeline. Extensive evaluations across diverse 3D inputs show that SQuadGen consistently outperforms existing methods, producing robust, artist-friendly simple quad layouts.

Problem

• quad layout
• 3D shape
• mesh simplification
• quad remeshing
• artist-friendly modeling

Innovation

• Chart Distance Fields
• quad layout generation
• diffusion-based generative model
• mesh simplification
• 3D shape representation