. Computer Graphics
3D scanning is a powerful tool for acquiring the shape and appearance of unique physical objects, and for bringing the creative design process from the sculptor into the computer. Capturing the properties of existing objects has driving applications in reverse engineering, inspection, virtual dissemination of museum artifacts, and anatomical modeling for medicine. In addition, when desiging new objects such as automobiles or synthetic movie characters, clay is frequently a superior "interface" than most computer-aided geometric design systems.
We are developing new methods for acquiring high resolution shape and color data. We are exploring ways of reconstructing useful computer models from this data. And we are devising algorithms that enable real-time interaction with these models by taking advantage of current trends in 3D graphics hardware development.Many objects in nature, like trees, mountains and seashells, have a property called selfsimilarity. Sometimes this property is very pronounced, other natural phenomena exhibit this property to a lesser degree. During the past years much attention has been paid to fractals, purely selfsimilar objects. We present a formalism, based on the well-known object-instancing graph, to represent objects which are not necessarily purely selfsimilar. We show that Iterated Function Systems and some famous variants can be described elegantly in this formalism. We also present an algorithm to raytrace such objects