SIMPLE AND EFFICIENT TOOLS FOR VIRSCULPT

Romain Raffin, Guillaume Thibault, Gilles Gesquière

LSIS, UMR CNRS 6168, ESIL - Case 925, 163 Avenue de Luminy,13288 Marseille, France

Keywords: Virtual sculpting, voxels, deformations, discrete potential fields.

Abstract: Numerous papers are describing methods for virtual sculpture which simulate real behaviours in a virtual

environment. During the sculpture process, the artist does not have to be disturbed by the latency of an

interaction between the object he works on and the tool he uses. Existing data structures or multiprocessing

enhancements are first ways to overcome this problem. We choose to focus our work on the interaction

between an object and a tool in order to improve the modelling process, even if the data model used is kept

simple.

1 INTRODUCTION

Since 1990, a lot of works have been done to

propose to artists an environment for virtual

sculpture. Several interesting functionalities can be

developed: a hard material would become soft; a

reaction process simulate a real one; a material can

be defined with visual or haptic characteristics that

differ from real material; an artist could record an

outline of his work to explore different creative

ways; finally, operation like undo, copy/past would

be interesting.

In the Virsculpt project (Raffin, 2004), our first

goal is to obtain a sculpture environment with no

latency during the interaction between the object and

the tool. The tool definition must also be generic to

permit wide range of sculpting tools. In this paper,

we focused on a volume manipulation methods and

we defined an interaction between tool and object.

Indeed, methods based on surfaces raise

problems if the object topology changes during the

sculpture process (Bill, 1995). Using surface

representation, such as McDonnell’s tri-parametric

Bsplines surfaces (McDonnell, 2001) is not as

intuitive as real sculpting due to the control points

structure.

Several virtual sculpting projects based on

volume models have been developed. First of all, a

volume representation based on CSG can be used,

but the increasing number of operations made during

sculpting process implies a growing computational

time. Such a model has been created by Mizuno to

sculpt virtual wood with an ellipsoidal tool as virtual

chisel (Mizuno, 1999). The two usual CSG

operations (union, intersection) linked to a tool

could be improved with R-functions (Pasko, 2001).

Another volumetric method has been

implemented by Galyean and Hughes (Galyean,

1991); their model is defined with a uniform discrete

spatial enumeration which contains density value.

3D tools modify the discrete potentials which

describe the object. Basic operations like addition or

subtraction, and several tool definitions (heat gun,

sand paper or colour modifier) are proposed.

Using a hierarchical representation decrease the

memory cost of the structure. Bærentzen chooses an

octree which permits to work on higher grid

resolution than uniform enumerations (Bærentzen,

1998). The only tool shape is a sphere, and the

permitted operations are CSG (addition and

subtraction) or surface filter “spray”. Tools are not

using the octree management to obtain an optimized

interaction process. Ferley also works on a

hierarchical organization of voxel to obtain a better

tool-object interaction (Ferley, 2000, 2002). The tool

is limited to an ellipsoid, which is artistically very

restrictive. This last method can be compared to

Kizamu proposed by Perry (Perry, 2001), which uses

distance fields in a discrete space octree. Operations

are CSG on the object or direct triangle face

modifications, but the Euclidean distance field used

instead of density raises discontinuity problems and

increases update computation time.

Simulating material deformation during the

interaction between a tool and an object is important

to obtain a more realistic behaviour. In the range of

436

Rafﬁn R., Thibault G. and Gesquière G. (2006).

SIMPLE AND EFFICIENT TOOLS FOR VIRSCULPT.

In Proceedings of the First International Conference on Computer Graphics Theory and Applications, pages 436-440

DOI: 10.5220/0001359104360440

 SciTePress

sculpting methods, we can cite a method using a

spring grid linking the voxels and the diffusion is

made from one voxel to his neighbour, reaching a

stable state (Dewaele, 2004). A similar method,

based on automata cells, is presented by (Druon,

2004 or Arata 1999), the diffusion algorithm uses

artificial intelligence laws to spread matter from a

voxel to one other, but the system still have to reach

a stable state.

Approaches based on discrete potential fields

seem to be interesting because the computation

process does not depend on the number of operation

between tool and object. We denoted that the main

difficulty is to provide adapted tools to the artists.

We can not imagine a traditional sculptor interacting

with unrealistic tools like an ellipsoid or

mathematical functions. Using hierarchical

representation for the object material and the tool is

interesting but the computation process of the

interaction is often expensive and difficult. The

purpose of this paper is to propose a simple but fast

method to deform a voxel-based object. Potential

field values are defined between 0 (the voxel is

empty) and 1 (the voxel is filled). If the value lies in

]0, 1[, the voxel is not completely filled. Material

can be added with a specific tool.

The defined tools will be used in our virtual

sculpting environment (Raffin, 2004). As previously

said, the main goal of this project is to provide a real

time system of interaction on common computers.

Interaction must be realistic and real-time. The

conservation volume aspect is also important. In this

approach, we are developing a set of rapid

algorithms to control and modify a sculpting

environment. We also use the selection of the usable

parts of a tool, as described in (Ayasse, 2000) to

accelerate object/tool collision detection. The first

part of this paper will introduce the diffusion method

of an action in the object. The second part describes

the distribution of the matter. Finally, we present

some images of the deformations and propose some

future works to improve our method.

2 SIMPLE DIFFUSION METHOD

Assuming the collision test between the object and

the tool has been done, we know the tool voxel(s)

that interacts with the object voxel(s). For the

considered object voxel, the matter it contains will

be suppressed. Then, this matter must be propagated

through the object to conserve its volume during

time.

In our method, we propose to displace matter in the

direction of the normal of the voxel tool which is

acting. Whatever the tool’s displacement, when it

reaches the object, we can determine the collided

voxels. If a transformation is applied to the tool, the

representation in the current grid that contains the

object and its environment must be recomputed. It

implies that each transformation of the tool is

embedded in the sculpting grid.

Firstly, we propose to explain our method in a

two dimensions space to avoid confusion (see Figure

1). The object is represented in cyan and is initially a

simple rectangular grid. The tool is an isotropic grid

of 13 voxels represented on the left of the figure.

The tool interacts with voxels of the object and we

focus our discussion on the dark blue voxel of the

tool. Its normal

, have two components along the

axis (

and

), implying

Nnn=+

uururuur

. The

corresponding voxel in the object contains an

amount Q of matter that needs to be diffused through

the object. Q is distributed along the axis, which

support the normal components, in q

and q

, with

Q=q

Tool

Object

Matter

repartition

Object

modification

Figure 1: principle of matter diffusion.

To distribute these two parts of Q, we cross the

voxels following the normal components, until a

non-filled voxel is encountered. It says that, if the

initial object is totally filled with matter, the moving

matter q

, which came from the collision with the

tool, will be added on a boundary, in the direction of

a normal component. If an encountered voxel have

an amount lesser than the maximum, it is filled until

the quantity q

is set to 0.

This method permits to know very quickly if a

voxel on the object surface is receiving matter and

the quantity it would receive. Due to its simplicity, it

does not provide the diffusion in the object (in all

cells of the grid) but towards its surface.

SIMPLE AND EFFICIENT TOOLS FOR VIRSCULPT

437

Figure 2: two views of the deformation of an initial

uniform cubic grid, by another cubic tool. The matter

diffusion is not realistic.

As seen on Figure 2, if the tool only contains

voxels in contact with axis oriented normals, the

resulting object seems to be pushed into from a

boundary to the other. On Figure 3, we can see the

same initial object modified by a spherical tool.

While the voxel normals of the tool are directed

radially, the resulting object voxels are pushed in

different directions while the tool enters the object.

Figure 3: two views of the deformation of the initial

uniform cubic grid by a spherical tool.

3 EFFICIENT MATTER

DISTRIBUTION

To perform a more realistic result, we need to

implement the distribution of the exiting matter on

the object surface.

Once the object surface is encountered, adding only

the remaining amount of matter q

to one voxel will

result in a poor realistic deformation. We propose

then an algorithm to distribute the matter to surface

neighbours, using a plasticity value of the object

matter. This method is frequently used in free form

deformations to deform the neighbourhood of

constraint points (Raffin, 1999).

We propose indeed to propagate the remaining

matter into a predefined range of voxels, from the

exiting voxel V. Matter repartition is now managed

by a radius of influence R and a repartition function

f. From the exiting voxel V, in the range of R, the

amount q

of matter must be distributed. If n

voxels

lie in this range, the matter they receive is q

/ n

This first method computes an average of matter

for each influenced voxels. It results in a cylinder at

the surface of the object. On the other hand, we can

use a repartition function as shown at Figure 4 and

the amount of matter decrease from the voxel V to

the voxels out of the range R.

Figure 4: distribution function.

The algorithm of the matter distribution is then:

– First of all, locate the exiting voxel V;

– From V, locate all its neighbours in a range of

influence give by R;

– Compute for each neighbour, the influence

value, depending of its distance to V and the

shape of the distribution function f.

distance

influence

GRAPP 2006 - COMPUTER GRAPHICS THEORY AND APPLICATIONS

438

– Affect each influenced voxel v

the amount of

matter:

j=1

( . influence_value )

influence_value

q =

∑

The effect of the distribution function shape is

represented at Figure 5.

Figure 5: Effect of distribution function f shape. The

distribution can be linear (left) or Gaussian (right).

To construct the distribution function, we use a

Bézier parametric curve, fixing the first control point

as the maximum, when the distance to V is null. The

last control point location implies that the function

value is 0 when the range R is reached. A control

point is let free to be modified interactively by the

user, to create a new function shape.

The images of Figure 6, show the resulting

object obtained with this method, using a cubic tool,

with two distribution functions. On the Figure 7, the

tool applied is a star-shaped tip, with viscosity

enabled or not.

4 CONCLUSION AND FUTURE

WORKS

The model we presented is admittedly simple but

rather efficient to provide rapid sculpting method.

For example, we act on a 50x50x50 grid with less

than 1/10th of a second to compute and roughly

render on a basic PC (Pentium 4 class, 512 Mo,

2Ghz CPU, with no GPU acceleration). As we said

previously, we deliberately do not use powerful data

structures to focus on the deformation method. The

complexity of global diffusion algorithm is

decreased by the use of normal components. The

realism of the deformation is only computed at the

object surface.

Using voxels seems to be a good way to obtain

real-time interaction. To increase the number of

voxels, we plan to use a paging method. We will

only use a partial part of the object. If we have time,

we can load other parts “on the fly”.

We also plan to improve our model by taking into

account the tool displacement direction when

striking (actually, the direction displacement is

perpendicular to the face of the object).

Indeed an important work would be made on the

reaction of the matter, using viscosity to provide

creases, bulges and matter crushing as, for example,

if the object is lying on a rigid table.

Figure 6: the two upper images show a deformation with a

cube, with different distribution functions. The last image

is the same spherical tool that the one used in Figure 3.

SIMPLE AND EFFICIENT TOOLS FOR VIRSCULPT

439

Figure 7: three views of a cube pushed into by a star-

shaped tip. The two first images are made without

viscosity and the down image use a high viscosity

value.

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