Abstract—In soft object modeling, primitive soft objects can be used to construct a complex soft object by performing addition operations only. This is because a primitive soft object is defined as the iso-surface of a field function which is a composition of a potential function and a distance function. In fact, the distance function determines the shape of a soft object. To deform the shape of a primitive soft object, this paper proposes dilation and erosion operations, which can be viewed as distance function operations because they perform on the distance function of a primitive soft object to be deformed and a chosen dilating or eroding distance function. Thus, dilation operation can be used to dilate a primitive soft object through the chosen dilating distance function, and erosion operation can be used to erode a primitive soft object through the chosen eroding distance function. Briefly, these two operations can deform the iso-surface of an existing distance function and then can be applied as a new distance function to define a new field function.

Index Terms—Field functions, distance functions, soft objects.

Pi-Chung Hsu is with the Department. of Information Management,Shu-Te University, Kaohsiung, Taiwan (e-mail: pichung@stu.edu.tw).

Cite: Pi-Chung Hsu, "Distance Function Operations for Developing New Field Functions in Soft Object Modeling," International Journal of Computer and Communication Engineering vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 179-183 , 2013.