A real-time deformable cutting method combining a uniform grid of linked voxels and an octree of linked voxels

Simulation speed is crucial for virtual reality simulators that simulate real-time cutting of deformable objects with haptic feedback, such as surgical simulators. This type of simulator combines visual feedback and haptic feedback, and therefore can be considered as a type of Multimedia Applications. To increase simulation speed, improvements are made in this paper to a previous deformable cutting method which divides a deformable object’s surface mesh into an interface mesh (including exterior surface mesh and interior surface mesh between different materials) constructed on a fine level linked voxel grid and a cut surface mesh constructed on a coarse level linked voxel grid. Our method changes the fine level linked voxel grid from a uniform grid to an octree. The algorithms for constructing and incrementally updating the object surface mesh and the collision proxy (an approximation of the object surface mesh used for collision processing) are changed accordingly. A new algorithm is proposed to resolve inconsistencies between partially cut and fully cut parts using visibility tests. Simulation tests show that our proposed method can moderately increase simulation speed during cutting and reduce CPU memory usage with almost imperceptible reductions in rendering qualities.