Virtual sculpting and deformable volume modelling

Volume modeling techniques are capable of modeling objects with possible change in topology and is widely used in virtual sculpting. A common practice is to provide shape-editing tools for adding or removing material from a volume model. Generating a solid mesh from a volume model is a time consuming process. A modification in the volume data will require a solid mesh to be regenerated for the deformation process. In this paper, the boundary element approach is adopted. Since the deformation is computed based on the iso-surface of the volume data, this eliminates the need for generating solid mesh from the volume data. By converting the deformed mesh to volume data, a deformed volume model can be further manipulated with existing volume modelling techniques.