Virtual Clay for Direct Hand Manipulation

In order to make virtual modeling as easy as real clay manipulation, we describe a realtime virtual clay model, specially designed for direct hand manipulation. We build on a previous layered model for clay, extending it to handle local properties such as colour or fluidity, to deal with an arbitrary number of tools, and to capture twist effects due to rotating tools. The resulting clay model is the first step towards a more long term goal, namely direct interaction through video tracking of the user’s hands.