Component-based polygonal approximation of soft objects

We propose a new polygonal approximation method for soft objects. While con ventional polygonization methods decompose space into small-sized cells and compute many pieces of polygons for the cells, this new method polygonizes a soft object by smoothing an initial polygonal approximation using subdiv ision surface schemes and an exact computation scheme. The initial polygona l approximation is generated by the union of the polygonal approximations o f the components that constitute the soft object. Our method has many advan tages over conventional methods: faster computation time. regular-sized pol ygons. efficient robust results, and multiresolutional representation. Thes e features will lead to an interactive modeling environment using soft obje cts as well as an efficient polygonal representation that is proper to be u sed in virtual reality and distributed environments. (C) 2001 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd.