We propose a new polygonal approximation method for soft objects. While the conventional 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 subdivision surface schemes. The initial polygonal approximation is generated by the union of the polygonal approximations of the components that constitute the soft object. Our method has many advantages over the conventional methods: faster computation time, regular-sized polygons, efficient robust results, and multiresolutional representation. These features will lead to an interactive modeling environment using soft objects as well as an efficient polygonal representation that is proper to be used in virtual reality and distributed environments.

We present a fast visualization scheme of soft objects by introducing an efficient evaluation method for a field function. The evaluation of a field function includes distance computation between a point in space and the defining primitives of the soft object. If the unnecessary distance computations between a point in space and the components that do not influence the point can be avoided, the evaluation can be accelerated. For this purpose, we decompose the space into adaptive‐sized cells according to the bounding volume of the components and build a data structure called an interval tree through which the influencing components for a point are sought. The bounding volume of a component is generated by considering the radius of a component and k‐DOPs. The proposed scheme can be used in many applications for soft objects such as modeling and rendering, especially in the interactive modeling process. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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