Generative modeling: a symbolic system for geometric modeling

This paper discusses a new, symbolic approach to geometric modeling called generative modeling. The approach allows specification, rendering, and analysis of a wide variety of shapes including 3D curves, surfaces, and solids, as well as higher-dimensional shapes such as surfaces deforming in time, and volumes with a spatially varying mass density. The system also supports powerful operations on shapes such as "reparameterize this curve by arclength", "compute the volume, center of mass, and moments of inertia of the solid bounded by these surfaces", or "solve this constraint or ODE system". The system has been used for a wide variety of applications, including creating surfaces for computer graphics animations, modeling the fur and body shape of a teddy bear, constructing 3D solid models of elastic bodies, and extracting surfaces from magnetic resonance (MR) data. Shapes in the system are specified using a language which builds multidimensional parametric...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1992
• Where: SIGGRAPH
• Authors: John M. Snyder, James T. Kajiya
• Keywords: Computer Graphics, Geometric Modeling, Parametric Function, SIGGRAPH 1992, Wide Variety