Surface Reconstruction for Interactive Modeling of Freeform Solids by Virtual Sculpting

This paper presents a new method for surface reconstruction from dexel data for virtual sculpting. This is part of our research efforts to develop a dexel model based sculpting system with the capability of interactive solid modeling with haptics interface. Dexel data are converted to a series of planar contours in parallel slices (i.e. cross sections). Then triangular meshes are created by connecting the contour points in adjacent slices. Examples are given to demonstrate the ability of the described method to convert from dexel data to triangular meshes for the viewing of a sculpted model in different directions.