T-splines are a generalization of NURBS surfaces, the control meshes of which allow T-junctions. T-splines can significantly reduce the number of superfluous control points in NURBS surfaces, and provide valuable operations such as local refinement and merging of several B-splines surfaces in a consistent framework. In this paper, we propose a variant of T-splines called Modified T-splines. The basic idea is to construct a set of basis functions for a given T-mesh that have the following nice properties: non-negativity, linear independence, partition of unity and compact support. Due to the good properties of the basis functions, the Modified T-splines are favorable both in adaptive geometric modeling and isogeometric analysis. 
Modified T-splines