Woerl,A.-C., Schoemer,E., Schwanecke,U.
Abstract:
Variable-radius offset surfaces find applications in various fields, such as variable brush strokes in 2D and 3D sketching and geometric modeling tools. In forensic facial reconstruction the skin surface can be inferred from a given skull by computing a variable-radius offset surface of the skull surface. Thereby, the skull is represented as a two-manifold triangle mesh and the facial soft tissue thickness is specified for each vertex of the mesh. We present a method to interactively visualize the wanted skin surface by rendering the variable-radius offset surfaces of all triangles of the skull mesh. We have also developed a special shader program which is able to generate a discretized volumetric representation that can be transformed into a skin mesh. In addition, we show the usefulness of our method to calculate classical Minkowski sums and demonstrate its use for packing problems.