News - Solid Modeling Solutions

08-10-04 Press Release < news < home

For immediate release:

SMS Announces Subdivision Surface Capability

BELLEVUE, WA – August 10, 2004 – Solid Modeling Solutions (SMS) is pleased to announce a major new capability in collaboration with SurfQuake, Inc., the company recently formed by Michael Lounsbery. Subdivision surface capabilities will be offered in SDLib, a new library that provides a powerful means of creating and editing complex shapes, that will open markets for SMS in 3D graphic and animation development as well as give SMLib users major new productivity gains and added flexibility.

SDLib will at first be available as a standalone library that reads a polygonal shape and outputs a subdivision surface, polygonal mesh, or NURBS representation. A later version of SDLib will fully integrate with SMLib, providing full NURBS-based functionality. SDLib will be provided as C++ source code, and will be priced on a subscription license basis without royalties.

SDLib subdivision surfaces provide a hierarchical approach for modeling smooth surfaces of any topology. Taking as input a polygon-based framework, and supporting increasing levels of detail as needed, subdivision surfaces give the user the freedom to easily create a smooth yet detailed surface through local editing and crease definition.

Subdivision surfaces created within SDLib allow access to faces, edges, and vertices at every detail level. SDLib operations on these surface features include adjacency queries, surface evaluation, hierarchy traversal, crease definition, iteration, and support for STL.

SDLib's tessellation of the surface produces a watertight polygonal mesh representation. Alternately, control vertices at any level may be fed back as input to SDLib, enabling topological changes at finer levels. Other tessellation capabilities are planned. SDLib can also produce a closely approximating NURBS representation of the subdivision surface, fully compatible with SMS NURBS libraries.

Additional details on SDLib can be found at the SMS website at www.smlib.com/sdlib.html.

More details on SMS, our products and services, as well as previous press releases can be found on the SMS website at www.smlib.com, by contacting Solid Modeling Solutions, at (206) 463-1417, or by sending an email to sales@smlib.com.