Silicon Graphics, Incorporated

Kari Antero Pulli

John Michael Lounsbery

Mark Gordon Segal

A computer implemented method edits a surface by displaying a surface rendered from a polygonal mesh defined by mesh elements, selecting, as an edit mesh element, a mesh element displayed in the surface, determining a set of affected mesh elements from the polygonal mesh wherein each affected mesh element is within a specified vicinity of the edit mesh element, editing the edit mesh element in response to user input, and editing the affected mesh elements based on the edited edit mesh element.

Editing a surface

A process for efficiently drawing subdivision surfaces. The present invention operates within a computer system for visually displaying 3 dimensional (3D) surfaces on a display. The present invention pulls polygons from a polygon mesh of a 3D surface. The polygons are stored into a 2 dimensional array such that the vertices of the polygons occupy nodes of the 2 dimensional array and are readily accessed. The polygons are subsequently divided into a plurality of resulting polygons. The resulting polygons are then sent to a graphics pipeline, wherein the graphics pipeline renders the resulting polygons into a 3D image on the computer display.

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Seattle, WA, United States of America

Kari Antero Pulli