Abstract
This paper describes an efficient solid modeling method for thin-walled plastic or sheet metal parts, based on the non-manifold offsetting operations. Since the previous methods for modeling and converting a sheet into a solid have adopted the boundary representations for solid object as their topological framework, it is difficult to represent the exact adjacency relationship between topological entities of a sheet model and a mixture of wireframe and sheet models that can appear in the meantime of modeling procedure, and it is hard to implement topological operations for sheet modeling and transformation of a sheet into a solid. To solve these problems, we introduce a non-manifold B-rep and propose a sheet conversion method based on a non-manifold offset algorithm. Because the non-manifold offset aigorithm based on mathematical definitions results in an offset solid with tubular and spherical thickness-faces we modify it to generate the ruled or planar thickness-faces that are mostly shown in actual plastic or sheet metal parts. In addition, in order to accelerate the Boolean operations used the offset algorithm, we also develope an efficient face-face intersection algorithm using topological adjacency information.
