Non-uniform Rational B-spline - History

History

Development of NURBS began in the 1950s by engineers who were in need of a mathematically precise representation of freeform surfaces like those used for ship hulls, aerospace exterior surfaces, and car bodies, which could be exactly reproduced whenever technically needed. Prior representations of this kind of surface only existed as a single physical model created by a designer.

The pioneers of this development were Pierre Bézier who worked as an engineer at Renault, and Paul de Casteljau who worked at Citroën, both in France. Bézier worked nearly parallel to de Casteljau, neither knowing about the work of the other. But because Bézier published the results of his work, the average computer graphics user today recognizes splines — which are represented with control points lying off the curve itself — as Bézier splines, while de Casteljau’s name is only known and used for the algorithms he developed to evaluate parametric surfaces. In the 1960s it became clear that non-uniform, rational B-splines are a generalization of Bézier splines, which can be regarded as uniform, non-rational B-splines.

At first NURBS were only used in the proprietary CAD packages of car companies. Later they became part of standard computer graphics packages.

Real-time, interactive rendering of NURBS curves and surfaces was first made available on Silicon Graphics workstations in 1989. In 1993, the first interactive NURBS modeller for PCs, called NöRBS, was developed by CAS Berlin, a small startup company cooperating with the Technical University of Berlin. Today most professional computer graphics applications available for desktop use offer NURBS technology, which is most often realized by integrating a NURBS engine from a specialized company.