Abstract
We introduce the concept of soft objects whose shapes change in response to their surroundings. Established geometric modelling techniques exist to handle most engineering components, including ‘free form’ shapes such as car bodies and telephones. More recently, there has been a lot of interest in modelling natural phenomena such as smoke, clouds, mountains and coastlines where the shapes are described stochastically, or as fractals.
None of these techniques lends itself to the description of soft objects. This class of objects includes fabrics, cushions, living forms, mud and water. In this paper, we describe a method of modelling such objects and discuss its uses in animation.
Our method is to represent a soft object, or collection of objects, as a surface of constant value in a scalar field over three dimensions. The main technical problem is to avoid calculating the field value at too many points. We do this with a combination of data structures at some cost in internal memory usage.
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© 1986 Springer-Verlag Tokyo
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Wyvill, G., McPheeters, C., Wyvill, B. (1986). Soft Objects. In: Kunii, T.L. (eds) Advanced Computer Graphics. Springer, Tokyo. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-68036-9_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-68036-9_8
Publisher Name: Springer, Tokyo
Print ISBN: 978-4-431-68038-3
Online ISBN: 978-4-431-68036-9
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