Controllable Shape Modeling with Neural Generalized Cylinder

TL;DR

This paper introduces neural generalized cylinders (NGC), a novel shape representation that enables explicit and intuitive manipulation of neural signed distance fields for complex shape deformation and blending.

Contribution

The work extends traditional generalized cylinders to neural representations, allowing explicit control and editing of neural shape features for non-rigid deformations.

Findings

NGC effectively handles complex curved deformations.

It enables local scaling and twisting of shapes.

Shape blending is achieved via neural feature interpolation.

Abstract

Neural shape representation, such as neural signed distance field (NSDF), becomes more and more popular in shape modeling as its ability to deal with complex topology and arbitrary resolution. Due to the implicit manner to use features for shape representation, manipulating the shapes faces inherent challenge of inconvenience, since the feature cannot be intuitively edited. In this work, we propose neural generalized cylinder (NGC) for explicit manipulation of NSDF, which is an extension of traditional generalized cylinder (GC). Specifically, we define a central curve first and assign neural features along the curve to represent the profiles. Then NSDF is defined on the relative coordinates of a specialized GC with oval-shaped profiles. By using the relative coordinates, NSDF can be explicitly controlled via manipulation of the GC. To this end, we apply NGC to many non-rigid deformation tasks like complex curved deformation, local scaling and twisting for shapes. The comparison on shape deformation with other methods proves the effectiveness and efficiency of NGC. Furthermore, NGC could utilize the neural feature for shape blending by a simple neural feature interpolation.