An Evaluation of CSG Trees Based on Polyhedral Solids

Abstract

Set operation on polyhedra is an important component of Geometric Modeling System (GMS) when a Constructive Solid Geometry (CSG) representation with polyhedral solid primitives is used. Output data will be the unique resulting polyhedron which provides an efficient data structure for displaying objects. With no use of spatial coherency, computational complexity of a set operation is quadratic. The new evaluation scheme called Boolean Octree limits set operation evaluation in a ‘minimal space of calculation’ where primitive boundaries intersect each other and where resulting evaluation participates in the construction of the final resulting object. Boolean Octree computes set operations in a local level providing a linear complexity for geometric calculations. During space subdivision, Boolean Octree has a global view on local CSG tree (projection of the CSG tree in local space) taking into account simplifications of the boolean expression. Set evaluation is done in the local volumes containing only two operands the configurations of which are ‘simple’, that is to say for a local description of an object there is only one vertex with any face number, one edge, or one face.