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Merging BSP trees yields polyhedral set operations

Published:01 September 1990Publication History
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Abstract

BSP trees have been shown to provide an effective representation of polyhedra through the use of spatial subdivision, and are an alternative to the topologically based b-reps. While bsp tree algorithms are known for a number of important operations, such as rendering, no previous work on bsp trees has provided the capability of performing boolean set operations between two objects represented by bsp trees, i.e. there has been no closed boolean algebra when using bsp trees. This paper presents the algorithms required to perform such operations. In doing so, a distinction is made between the semantics of polyhedra and the more fundamental mechanism of spatial partitioning. Given a partitioning of a space, a particular semantics is induced on the space by associating attributes required by the desired semantics with the cells of the partitioning. So, for example, polyhedra are obtained simply by associating a boolean attribute with each cell. Set operations on polyhedra are then constructed on top of the operation of merging spatial partitionings. We present then the algorithm for merging two bsp trees independent of any attributes/semantics, and then follow this by the additional algorithmic considerations needed to provide set operations on polyhedra. The result is a simple and numerically robust algorithm for set operations.

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            cover image ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics
            ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics  Volume 24, Issue 4
            Aug. 1990
            377 pages
            ISSN:0097-8930
            DOI:10.1145/97880
            Issue’s Table of Contents
            • cover image ACM Conferences
              SIGGRAPH '90: Proceedings of the 17th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques
              September 1990
              452 pages
              ISBN:0897913442
              DOI:10.1145/97879

            Copyright © 1990 ACM

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            • Published: 1 September 1990

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