Component-based polygonal approximation of soft objects

We propose a new polygonal approximation method for soft objects. While the conventional polygonization methods decompose space into small-sized cells and compute many pieces of polygons for the cells, this new method polygonizes a soft object by smoothing an initial polygonal approximation using subdivision surface schemes. The initial polygonal approximation is generated by the union of the polygonal approximations of the components that constitute the soft object. Our method has many advantages over the conventional methods: faster computation time, regular-sized polygons, efficient robust results, and multiresolutional representation. These features will lead to an interactive modeling environment using soft objects as well as an efficient polygonal representation that is proper to be used in virtual reality and distributed environments.