| Despite of the facts that clay is a popular modeling medium and in the last one and a half decade a lot of work has been done on virtual clay modeling and sculpting, there are only a few commercial tools for this purpose. This can be explained by two reasons. Firstly, the fast and robust systems do not mimic the properties of clay accurately, making them less popular than freeform tools. Secondly, systems that represent the physical properties of clay in a realistic manner need high-end and specialized computation and display hardware which makes them less viable. In this work we explore ways to overcome the difficulties with previous systems. We address these problems by a novel method to represent virtual clay that fuses the best features of FEM, generalized subdivision surfaces and data compression techniques. |
