An automatic modeling method for fitting volumetric objects with metacubes

Implicit modeling is an important technique in the modeling of informal objects. However, the available automatic modeling algorithms with implicit skeletal elements are not very advanced. In this paper, we propose a new skeletal element, called a metacube, and an automatic modeling technique for informal objects represented by volumetric data. The metacube has the merits of a metaball and also enhances the modeling ability of informal objects containing planar surfaces. For a 256/spl times/256/spl times/256 size of input volume, the proposed method takes a short generation time (less than ten minutes) on an SGI Indigo 2 workstation.