ADAPTIVE POLYGONIZATION OF IMPLICIT SURFACES USING SIMPLICIAL DECOMPOSITION AND BOUNDARY CONSTRAINTS

Abstract

This paper presents a method to generate a polygonal approximation of implicit surfaces. Space partitioning by simplicial decomposition is used to sample the surface, which provides an unambiguous framework for polygon creation. Simplices are adaptively subdivided in order to faithfully represent the surface with a minimum number of elements. The space subdivision is done recursively, without the need of additional data structures to keep track of the process, which usually results in large memory requirements. Furthermore, boundary constraints are imposed on the surface tesselation to overcome the problem of discontinuities usually associated with adaptive methods.