Parallel interactive virtual machining on shared memory multiprocessors

Interactive sculpting is the process by which a designer can impose free form shape changes on the object being designed. It has potential applications in fields like computer aided geometric design and rapid prototyping. Our approach to interactive sculpting is through the intermediate step of interactive virtual machining (IVM). IVM is a subset of interactive sculpting in that the degrees of freedom available to the sculptor are reduced. The goal of our work is to demonstrate the feasibility of interactive virtual machining on a shared memory multiprocessor workstation. Our prototype IVM system uses a voxel based approach. It provides common machining tools to the user and uses Minkowski operations (P.K. Ghosh, 1993) to implement those tools. Parallel implementation of the virtual machining tools has shown that sculpting with 256/sup 3/ voxel array is possible with frame rate of around 20 frames/sec. We present the parallel algorithms for virtual machining tools and the results of implementation on a shared memory multiprocessor environment.