Spheres, molecules, and hidden surface removal
Dan Halperin, Mark H. Overmars · 1994
We devise techniques to manipulate a collection of loosely interpenetrating spheres in three-dimensional space. Our study is motivated by the representation and manipulation of molecular configurations, modeled by a collection of spheres. We analyze the sphere model and point to its favorable properties that make it more easy to manipulate than an arbitrary collection of spheres. For this special sphere model we present efficient algorithms for computing its union boundary and for hidden surface removal. The efficiency and practicality of our approach are demonstrated by experiments on actual protein data.