A real-time virtual sculpting application with a haptic device

Abstract

In this paper, a 3D virtual sculpting application is developed for 3D virtual models with removing or adding materials by using Boolean operations. Virtual sculpting simulation reads 3D virtual models in a variety of file formats such as raw and stl consisting of a triangle poligon mesh and voxelizes its outer surface and interiror volüme to generate its volumetric dataset. We used octree and hashing techniques to reduce the memory requirement needed for volumetric dataset. The surface is locally reconstructed using Marching Cubes algorithm known as the most popular isosurface extraction algorithm after removing or adding material to the 3D virtual model. The user interacts with the model by using a haptic device to give the force-feedback like real-life sculpting.