We introduce Topological Offsets, a novel approach to generate manifold and
self-intersection-free offset surfaces that are topologically equivalent to an
offset infinitesimally close to the surface.
Our approach, by construction, creates a manifold, watertight, and selfintersection-free offset surface
strictly enclosing the input, while doing a
best effort to move it to a prescribed distance from the input. Differently from
existing approaches, we embed the input in a volumetric mesh, and insert a
topological offset around the mesh with purely combinatorial operations.
The topological offset is then inflated/deflated to match the user-prescribed
distance, while enforcing that no intersections or non-manifold configurations are introduced.
We evaluate the effectiveness and robustness of our approach on the
non-intersecting subset of Thingi10k, and show that topological offsets are
beneficial in multiple graphics applications, including (1) converting nonmanifold surfaces to manifold
ones, (2) creation of nested cages/layered
offsets, and (3) reliably computing finite offsets.