Splitting Cubes: a Fast and Robust Technique for Representing Cuts with Mesh-free Methods

This paper presents a novel technique to represent cuts on deformable models implemented with mesh-free methods. Mesh-free methods have become a popular choice for modeling deformable objects. Unfortunately, among their many good properties, they do not explicitly represent the surface of the object and it seems quite a difficult task to enable real-time cutting on these models. Our method uses a regular decomposition of the space in cubic cells and encodes the surface using only the intersections with the edges of the cubes and handling implicitly all the changes on topology. Furthermore a new way to update the physical model is introduced which is easily implemented by the graphics hardware