SOLID TEXTURING OF SOFT OBJECTS

Abstract

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 into sub-objects dynamically. This means that you cannot map a solid texture onto such an object simply using a function of the space co-ordinates. We have taken a different approach. Our soft objects are modelled as the volume enclosed by an iso-surface of a field calculated from a set of key points. We ascribe to each key point a set of values which represent a position in an abstract texture space. Any point on the surface of an object has a field value due to each key point and this value is used as a weight in finding a weighted vector sum of these positions. This vector sum is used to select a surface specification from the texture space. These textures retain their consistency during distortion and metamorphoses of objects. A great variety of animation effects can be achieved with this process.