This paper presents a new method for surface reconstruction from dexel data for virtual sculpting. We are in the midst of developing a dexel model based sculpting system having the capability of interactive solid modeling with haptics interface. The geometric modeling of our sculpting system is based on the Sweep Differential Equation method to compute the boundary of the tool swept volume. Ray casting is used to perform Boolean operations between the tool swept volume and the virtual stock in dexel models to simulate the sculpting process. The dexel data are converted to a series of planar contours in parallel slices (i.e. cross sections). The overlapping ratio between two contour areas is used as the criterion for deciding on the corresponding contours in two adjacent slices. The tiling problem is tackled by using the rule of the shortest distance between points on two corresponding contours. The branching problem is solved by adding one line segment between two contours to form one composite contour. Examples are given to demonstrate the ability of the developed code to convert from dexel data to triangular meshes for the viewing of a sculpted model in different directions.
Template-based surface reconstruction from cross-sections