Implicit Blending Revisited

International audienceBlending is both the strength and the weakness of functionally based implicit surfaces (such as F-reps or softobjects). While it gives them the unique ability to smoothly merge into a single, arbitrary shape, it makes implicit modelling hard to control since implicit surfaces blend at a distance, in a way that heavily depends on the slope of the field functions that define them. This paper presents a novel, generic solution to blending of functionally-based implicit surfaces: the insight is that to be intuitive and easy to control, blends should be located where two objects overlap, while enabling other parts of the objects to come as close to each other as desired without being deformed. Our solution relies on automatically defined blending regions around the intersection curves between two objects. Outside of these volumes, a clean union of the objects is computed thanks to a new operator that guarantees the smoothness of the resulting field function; meanwhile, a smooth blend is generated inside the blending regions. Parameters can automatically be tuned in order to prevent small objects from blurring out when blended into larger ones, and to generate a progressive blend when two animated objects come in contact

SCALe-invariant Integral Surfaces

International audienceExtraction of skeletons from solid shapes has attracted quite a lot of attention, but less attention was paid so far to the reverse operation: generating smooth surfaces from skeletons and local radius information. Convolution surfaces, i.e. implicit surfaces generated by integrating a smoothing kernel along a skeleton, were developed to do so. However, they failed to reconstruct prescribed radii and were unable to model large shapes with fine details. This work introduces SCALe-invariant Integral Surfaces (SCALIS), a new paradigm for implicit modeling from skeleton graphs. Similarly to convolution surfaces, our new surfaces still smoothly blend when field contributions from new skeleton parts are added. However, in contrast with convolution surfaces, blending properties are scale invariant. This brings three major benefits: the radius of the surface around a skeleton can be explicitly controlled, shapes generated in blending regions are self-similar regardless of the scale of the model, and thin shape components are not excessively smoothed out when blended into larger ones

Locally restricted blending of Blobtrees

Blobtrees are volume representations particularly useful for models which require smooth blending. When blending is applied to two or more Blobtree models, extra volume will be created in between the two surfaces to form a smooth connection. Although it is easy to apply blending, it is hard to accurately control the resulting shape. More complications arise when the blended objects have large size differences. In this case the influence of the larger objects can overwhelm the influence of the smaller objects. As a result, the shape of the smaller objects can change drastically and the connection between surfaces can appear sharp instead of smooth. This paper presents a locally restricted blend method that solves the blending problem described above. The locally restricted blend locally changes the blending influence of each of the surfaces in order to control blending with the other surfaces. Unlike previous methods, this blend method works with multiple Blobtree surfaces and offers intuitive control over the resulting shape