Simple and branched skins of systems of circles and convex shapes

Recently, there has been considerable interest in skinning circles and spheres. In this paper we present a simple algorithm for skinning circles in the plane. Our novel approach allows the skin to touch a particular circle not only at a point, but also along a whole circular arc. This results in naturally looking skins. Due to the simplicity of our algorithm, it can be generalised to branched skins, to skinning simple convex shapes in the plane, and to sphere skinning in 3D. The functionality of the designed algorithm is presented and discussed on several examples.