Abstract

The importance of shape modeling in virtual reality, vir tual prototyping and computational vision was a challeng ing subject and a long motivation for researchers. The main idea of function-based approach to shape modeling is that complex geometric shapes can be generated from a ”small formula” rather than a very complicated meshing process. In this paper, a web-base approach for shape modeling and visualization is proposed. A Java Applet using Java ob jects for shapes generation and visualization is developed. Different parametric and implicit functions or their combi nation are used to generate mechanical components shapes such as springs, seashell surfaces and chains. Using a mat ing process inside the Java Applet, sophisticated shapes such as gears and corkscrews have been generated with out increasing the application size, and with a very good computational time.