An editable nonmanifold boundary representation

An approach to boundary evaluation and a boundary representation are presented. The approach uses nonmanifold topology (NMT) to overcome editing and coverage limitations associated with the manifold nature of existing boundary evaluation schemes. It merges the input primitives into a single representation and selects the entities in the merged set that constitute the result of the Boolean operations. Because this approach maintains a complete description of the input primitives, it provides some significant performance advantages when editing. In addition, the domain of 3D Boolean operations is extended to include surface and wireframe information as well as the traditional solid information. The implementation and testing of the approach are discussed.<>