Physical modeling with B-spline surfaces for interactive design and animation

Abstract

Physically based modeling has recently become a subject of widespread interest. This paper defines a model of elastic and plastic B-spline surfaces which supports both animation and design operations, including the interference detection, within the 'Eplastics'/Alpha-1 modeling environment. We develop 'refinement' operations for spring and hinge B-spline models which are compatible with the physics and the mathematics of B-spline models, including refinement. It is also a step towards a more continuous physical representation of a physical model than the more standard discretized geometry point mass models. We present some interactive operations currently in real-time and some which could be real-time with further optimization and use of multiple processors on machines such as the SGI Iris 4D/240GTX. A movie is used to illustrate the results.