Interactive Shape Generation and Spatial Conflict Testing

A general purpose, research oriented, interactive modeling system is presented. It is based on two different coherent polyhedral shape representations: a planar graph, used for computation and data manipulation, and a relational-database for compact store and general communication with application programs. The two representations effectively partition the system shape-space into active and inactive shapes, respectively. These are explicitly interchangeable by the user, keeping the actual workspace at a manageable size. The basic functionalities provided by the system include the combination of primitive shapes into complex objects by means of spatial set operators (union, intersection and difference), their modeling by means of scaling, rotation and translation, spatial interference detection and graphical display capabilities.