Dennis Bukenberger

TU Munich

A golden sea turtle glides through the water, its shell rendered as a striking blueish diamond. The carapace is represented as an unfoldable low-poly triangle mesh, generated via a feature-preserving simplification that balances visual approximation with coarsening constraints. Starting on a dense surface, the method strategically places new vertices along dominant features, ensuring well-shaped triangles and consistent edge lengths for fabrication. Unfoldability is achieved by coupling the coarsening process with an automatically updated cut graph, which selects low-saliency seams to allow flattening without overlaps. The result preserves the shell's global shape and local geometric features (concavities, convexities, ridges, and valleys) while producing fabrication-ready geometry. The image was composited using Blender and rendered with Cycles.