Discrete tools for virtual sculpture

In a virtual sculpture project, we represent the material to be sculpted as a set of volume elements (voxels). Sculpture operations of subtraction and addition are applied on these voxels with tools with various shapes and sizes. A major advantage of our system is that sculpted objects can then be used as new tools, because the same model is used for both objects and tools. This is a multiresolution model based on a 3D wavelet transform. We take advantage of the levels of detail to speed up display and sculpture. However, using discrete models for objects and tools leads to three problems: important computation time, aliasing when tools are rotated, and how to perform sculpture operations between discrete objects and tools with different orientations and sizes. In this paper, we describe our model and then propose solutions to these problems that allow real-time performance.