detail sculpting using cubical marching squares
The demand for customizing models is increasing rapidly, but the related techniques for sculpting in the volumetric form raise several issues that need to be addressed. These issues include preserving sharp features, inter-cell independency, maintaining consistent topology, and adaptive resolution. These issues affect the quality of resulting shapes and the execution speed while manipulating models. Traditionally, marching cubes algorithm provides satisfactory performance for visualizing volume data in sculpting applications. However, sharp features, which are important characteristics of models, are lost while using marching cubes to visualize the resulting volume data. Furthermore, we need to perform crack patching operations to fill up the gaps between different resolutions in adaptive resolution. In contrast, these issues could be easily fulfilled by replacing the underlying isosurfacing algorithm with cubical marching squares algorithm. In this paper, we propose data structures for storing volume data and methods for Boolean operations to manipulate these data. We archive highly detailed models while sculpting at interactive speed by using proposed data structures and methods in conjunction with cubical marching squares algorithm.
marching cubes boolean operations volume sculpting