Structured Topological Complexes: A Feature-Based API for Non-Manifold Topologies

Abstract

Much of recent research in solid modeling was focused on the extension of boundary representation schemes to non-manifold models and, more recently, on the definition of high-level operators for creating such models. We propose here a very simple, yet general formalism, which subsumes and simplifies many previous approaches. Our Structural Topological Complexes (STC) extend our previous work on Selective Geometric Complexes (SGC) and on Constructive Non-Regularized Geometry (CNRG) and provide the foundations for a new generation of representations--both constructive and evaluated--and of APIs that are independent of the particular geometric domain and even of the particular approximation scheme for geometric primitives.