Heterogeneous Object Visualization Based on Non-manifold and Feature Tree Representations

A novel heterogeneous object visualization approach is presented. Boundary surface sub-faceting is proposed to eliminate the abrupt material transition effects. Adaptive boundary sub-faceting and redundant face removal are further applied to speed up the visualization process. The boundary mesh generation algorithm is provided to render the external geometries as well as the internal material heterogeneities. The underlying ideas of the proposed approach include: 1) Using a feature tree based surface tessellation strategy, the material distributions of the boundary surfaces are first evaluated by means of a topological analysis on the heterogeneous feature tree structures; and additional surface sub-faceting is only applied where necessary. 2) Based on the non-manifold heterogeneous cellular representation, the redundant candidate surfaces are directly removed to cater for real-time visualization requirements. The proposed visualization scheme has been successfully implemented and tested in our heterogeneous CAD modeler (CAD4D), and results show that the proposed approach can generate high quality renderings at interactive rates.