Ray-Scaling Operations for Deformation of Soft Objects

In soft object modeling, in order to make the shapes of primitive soft objects more diverse, this paper proposes ray-scaling operations to deform a primitive soft object. The proposed ray-scaling operations perform scaling via a given scaling object. But unlike scaling of affine transform which gives the same scaling factor to all the points, ray-scaling operations give each point in different directions an individual and a different scaling factor obtained from the ray-scaling object. As a result, by choosing suitable scaling objects, ray-scaling operations are able to erode or dilate a soft object locally with many special deformation effects. This paper also applies super-ellipsoids, super-quadrics and generalized distance functions to define a scaling object, and then successfully deforms a sphere into a six-balled, eight-balled or ten-balled object by using scaling objects of polyhedron, each of whose facets can deform to be a ball.