Interactive sculpting with implicit surfaces

Providing the user with an intuitive sculpting system similar to real clay is one of the most challenging long term goals in interactive modeling. The user should ideally be able to deform, add and remove material, with no restriction on the geometry and topological genius of the solid being edited. Implicit surfaces, defined as iso-surfaces of scalar fields, are a very attractive model in such situations. This talk reviews two alternative implicit representations, the constructive approach versus sampled fields, and discusses their convenience for modeling virtual clay. An implicit sculpting system which incorporates force feedback and relies on multiresolution to accelerate editing is presented.