3D modeling with silhouettes

Abstract

We present a new sketch-based modeling approach in which models are interactively designed by drawing their 2D silhouettes from different views. The core idea of our paper is to limit the input to 2D silhouettes, removing the need to explicitly create or position 3D elements. Arbitrarily complex models can be constructed by assembling them out of parts defined by their silhouettes, which can be combined using CSG operations. We introduce a new simplified algorithm to compute CSG solids that leverages special properties of silhouette cylinders to convert the 3D CSG problem into one that can be handled entirely with 2D operations, making implementation simpler and more robust. We evaluate our approach by modeling a random sampling of man-made objects taken from the words in WordNet, and show that all of the tested man-made objects can be modeled quickly and easily using our approach.