Modeling Murex cabritii Sea Shell with a Structured Implicit Surface Modeler

Implicit surface modeling systems have been used since the mid-1980’s for the generation of cartoon-like characters. Recently implicit models combined with constructive solid geometry (CSG) have been used to build engineering models with automatic blending. This work is based on a structured implicit modeling system which includes CSG, warping, 2D texture mapping and operations based on the BlobTree, and its application to the generation of a complex and visually accurate biological model of the sea shell Murex cabritii. Since the model is purely procedurally defined and does not rely on polygon mesh operations, it is resolution independent and can be rendered directly using ray tracing. An interface has been built for the BlobTree using an interpreted programming language (Python). The language interface readily allows a user to procedurally describe the shell based on numeric data taken from the actual object.