INST-Sculpt: Interactive Stroke-based Neural SDF Sculpting

TL;DR

This paper introduces INST-Sculpt, a novel interactive tool for stroke-based editing of neural implicit 3D shapes, enabling intuitive and precise surface modifications directly on neural SDF representations.

Contribution

It presents a framework for real-time, stroke-based surface sculpting on neural implicit models, bridging the gap between traditional mesh sculpting and neural representations.

Findings

Enables smooth, precise surface edits on neural SDFs

Supports real-time, stroke-based shape manipulation

Preserves the smoothness of implicit representations during editing

Abstract

Recent advances in implicit neural representations have made them a popular choice for modeling 3D geometry, achieving impressive results in tasks such as shape representation, reconstruction, and learning priors. However, directly editing these representations poses challenges due to the complex relationship between model weights and surface regions they influence. Among such editing tools, sculpting, which allows users to interactively carve or extrude the surface, is a valuable editing operation to the graphics and modeling community. While traditional mesh-based tools like ZBrush facilitate fast and intuitive edits, a comparable toolkit for sculpting neural SDFs is currently lacking. We introduce a framework that enables interactive surface sculpting edits directly on neural implicit representations. Unlike previous works limited to spot edits, our approach allows users to perform stroke-based modifications on the fly, ensuring intuitive shape manipulation without switching representations. By employing tubular neighborhoods to sample strokes and custom brush profiles, we achieve smooth deformations along user-defined curves, providing precise control over the sculpting process. Our method demonstrates that intricate and versatile edits can be made while preserving the smooth nature of implicit representations.