Three-Dimensional Shape Modelling of Metal Foam with Rounded Cells by Implicit Surfaces

To construct a model of metal foam that has rounded cells such as a real one, an implicit surface based modelling method has been proposed. In this method, uniformed points are first generated randomly by Poisson-disk sampling, and a Voronoi diagram is constructed from the points. In addition, an implicit function f (x) is generated in each of Voronoi cells by setting some constraints appropriately. An implicit surface is represented as f (x) = 0, and the constraints are set so that f (x) = 0 is generated inside each of Voronoi cells. In this model, walls of metal foam are represented by space between implicit surfaces of adjacent Voronoi cells. Rounded walls that have various thicknesses can be constructed by adjusting the constraints. In addition, the walls can be converted to a solid model constructed as tetrahedra filling the space.