(Georgia Institute of Technology, 1999)
Nooruddin, Fakir S.; Turk, Greg
Two important tools for manipulating polygonal models are simplification and repair, and we present voxel-based methods for performing both of these tasks. We describe a method for converting polygonal models to a volumetric representation in a way that handles models with holes, double walls and intersecting parts. This allows us to perform polygon model repair simply by converting a model to and from the volumetric domain. We also describe a new topology-altering simplification method that is based on 3D morphological operators. Visually unimportant features such as tubes and holes may be eliminated from a model by the open and close morphological operators. Our simplification approach accepts polygonal models as input, scan converts these to create a volumetric description, performs topology modification and then converts the results back to polygons. We then apply a topology-preserving polygon simplification technique to produce a final model. Our simplification method produces results that are everywhere manifold.