Practical volumetric sculpting

We present a sculpture metaphor for rapid shape prototyping. The sculpted shape is the isosurface of a scalar field spatially sampled. The user can deposit material wherever he desires in space and then iteratively refine it, using a tool to add, remove, paint, or smooth some material. We allow the use of free-form tools that can be designed inside the application. We also propose a technique to mimic local deformations so that we can use the tool as a stamp to make imprints on an existing shape. We focus on the rendering quality too, exploiting lighting variations and environment textures that simulate good-quality highlights on the surface. Both greatly enhance the shape estimation, which is a crucial step in this iterative design process, in our opinion. The use of stereo also greatly eases the understanding of spatial relationships. Our current implementation is based on GLUT and can run the application both on Unix-based systems, such as Irix and Linux, and on Windows systems. We obtain interactive response times, strongly related to the size of the tool. The performance issues and limitations are discussed.