Modeling complex heterogeneous objects with non-manifold heterogeneous cells

This paper presents a new approach to model complex heterogeneous objects with simultaneous geometry intricacies as well as complex material distributions. Different from most of the existing approaches, which utilize manifold B-Rep and the assembly representations, the proposed scheme takes advantage of the non-manifold cellular representations to model the geometries of the heterogeneous objects. With the aid of the cell adjacency information and attribute based reasoning, complex, smooth and versatile material distributions can be defined upon the intricate geometries. Compared with other similar approaches, the proposed scheme (1) generates heterogeneous object models with higher data consistencies and lower redundancies; (2) naturally avoids unnecessary/repetitive computations and thus improves computation efficiencies; (3) represents versatile material variations/distributions using different heterogeneous feature tree (HFT) structures. The detailed representation, associated algorithms and a prototype software package are presented. Example heterogeneous objects modeled with the proposed approach are provided. q 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.