Solid Texturing of Soft Objects

Since the shape of a soft object changes in response to its surroundings, it is difficult to give a single position in space as the location of the object. Indeed objects can and do break dynamically into subobjects. This means that you cannot map a solid texture onto such an object simply by using a function of the space coordinates. We have taken a different approach. Our soft objects are modeled as the volume enclosed by an isosurf ace of a field calculated from a set of key points. For each key point, we describe an abstract texture space. Any point on the surface of an object has, associated with each key point, a position in this space and a field contribution. A vector sum of these positions, weighted by the field contributions, is used to select a surface specification from the texture space. Textures mapped with this process retain their consistency during distortion and metamorphoses of objects, permitting a great variety of animation effects.