CUBICOIDS - MODELING AND VISUALIZATION

The objective of this paper is to develop a new implicit representatio n of free-form surfaces which is well suited for modeling as well as f or high-quality rendering purposes. The core of our approach is a sche me for constructing tangent plane continuous surfaces passing through an arbitrary set of points in R3 according to some prescribed topology which is supposed to be given in terms of a piecewise triangular inte rpolant of the points. The constructed surface consists of algebraic p atches of degree three and matches given normal directions at the data points. In contrast to an earlier scheme based on quadric patches it requires a significantly less complicated patch structure, is complete ly local, and involves a robust default choice for shape parameters wh ich, in particular, supports selecting the ''correct'' zero sheets of the third-order patches.