Non-evaluated manipulation of complex CSG solids

Abstract

One of the most important problems to solve in Solid Modeling is computing boolean operations for solids (union, intersection and difference). In this paper we present a method to obtain the boolean operators based on covering the solids by simplices without evaluating the boundary. The representation of the obtained solid does not correspond with the minimal boundary of the solid, but using the appropriate algorithms it is possible to calculate some properties of the final solid, such as point-in-polyhedron test, visualization, volume or octree generation. The proposed method is also suitable for complex solids bounded by triangular meshes or CSG with polyhedral primitives.