Implicit Surfaces
2 messages in this thread
Does anyone out there know the definition of implicit surfaces?
How do they relate to 3DS?
I am thinking about taking course #25 at Siggraph…It souonds very interesting
but I am unsure of what exactly an implicit surface is and how it will help me
in the future.
Thanks…
-KT
You lucky dog you…that sounds like a hot course!
Someone else could probably define it better, but implicit surfaces can be
thought of as surfaces that are described by equations of forces, instead of
being described explicitly as a collection of vertices. The user puts a couple
of primitives in space, and specifies how strong their fields are. Primitives
will "flow" towards each other, or repel each other, etc. Sometimes this is
called "soft modeling," sometimes "blobby models," sometimes
"metaballs"…number of variations, same basic approach.
The course instructors are the people who've done much of the breaking research
in this area — a great opportunity. I don't know of much work with implicit
surfaces on Mac/Amiga/PC today — POV-RAY has an implementation of blobby
objects, don't know the details — but there's much interest, good bet that it
will be available sometime in the future.
For more info, check out papers by the course instructors in recent SIGGRAPH
journals.
Regards,
jd