Interactive global and local deformations for virtual clay

Making virtual modeling as easy and intuitive as real-clay manipulation is still an unsolved problem. This paper takes a step in this direction: in addition to offering standard features such as addition and removal of material, it uses a new real-time plasticity model to let the user apply local and global deformations such as those made in real clay by pressing with a finger or bending a sculpture with one hand. Although not completely physically accurate, the model exhibits several important features of real clay, namely plasticity, mass conservation, and surface tension effects. These features make the model intuitive, since the user obtains the shapes he expects, as demonstrated by our results.