Virtual sculpture : from clay models to spatial deformations

The digital medium makes it possible to sculpt or model forms directly in 3D, freeing us from constraints such as gravity or material drying, and offering new operations (copy-paste, scale changes, undo/redo, etc.). This lecture has detailed the various representations for virtual sculpture and the associated interaction metaphors, developed over more than fifteen years. From the first implicit representations, allowing only the addition and removal of material, we moved on to physically-inspired models, enabling the free modeling of virtual clay. The problem of interacting with this material then became more acute, leading to the development of interfaces for bare-hand modeling, such as the "Hand-Navigator". In practice, geometric approaches such as gesture-controlled, constant-volume deformations of space proved easier to use.