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The SHIVA project was designed to provide virtual sculpting tools for young people with complex disabilities, allowing them to engage with artistic and creative activities that they might otherwise never be able to access. Their creations are then physically built using 3D printing. To achieve this, the authors built a generic, accessible GUI and a suitable geometric modeling system and used these to produce two prototype modeling exercises. These tools were deployed in a school for students with complex disabilities and are now being used for a variety of educational and developmental purposes. This article presents the project's motivations, approach, and implementation details together with initial results, including 3D printed objects designed by young people with disabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Signed distance fields obtained from polygonal meshes are commonly used in various applications. However, they can have C¹ discontinuities causing creases to appear when applying operations such as blending or metamorphosis. The focus of this work is to efficiently evaluate the signed distance function and to apply a smoothing filter to it while preserving the shape of the initial mesh. The resulting function is smooth almost everywhere, while preserving the exact shape of the polygonal mesh. Due to its low complexity, the proposed filtering technique remains fast compared to its main alternatives providing C¹-continuous distance field approximation. Several applications are presented such as blending, metamorphosis and heterogeneous modelling with polygonal meshes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Morphological shape design is interpreted in this paper as a search for new shapes from a particular application domain represented by a set of selected shape instances. This paper proposes a new foundation for morphological shape design and generation. In contrast to existing generative procedures, an approach based on a user-controlled metamorphosis between functionally based shape models is presented. A formulation of the pairwise metamorphosis is proposed with a variety of functions described for the stages of deformation, morphing and offsetting. This formulation is then extended to the metamorphosis between groups of shapes with user-defined, dynamically correlated and weighted feature elements. A practical system was implemented in the form of plugin to Maya and tested by an industrial designer on a group of representative shapes from a particular domain. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]