Facetons: face primitives for building 3D architectural models in virtual environments
Naoki Sasaki, Hsiang‐Ting Chen, Daisuke Sakamoto, Takeo Igarashi · Computer Animation and Virtual Worlds · 2014
Abstract We presentfacetons, geometric modeling primitives designed for building architectural models especially effective for a virtual environment where six degrees of freedom input devices are available. Afacetonis an oriented point floating in the air and defines a plane of infinite extent passing through the point. The polygonal mesh model is constructed by taking the intersection of the planes associated with thefacetons. With the simple interaction offaceton, users can easily create 3D architecture models. Thefacetonprimitive and its interaction reduce the overhead associated with standard polygonal mesh modeling, where users have to manually specify vertexes and edges which could be far away. Thefacetonrepresentation is inspired by the research on boundary representations (B‐rep) and constructive solid geometry, but it is driven by a novel adaptive bounding algorithm and is specifically designed for 3D modeling activities in an immersive virtual environment. We describe the modeling method and our current implementation. The implementation is still experimental but shows potential as a viable alternative to traditional modeling methods. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.