Elastic and Plastic Surfaces for Modeling and Animation

This thesis presents eplastics, a modeling and animation tool developed to represent elastic and plastic surfaces under the B-spline representation. Eplastics derives its model from concepts found in physically based modeling of articulated motion, rigid bodies and deformable models. Eplastics works within the Alpha_1 environment and applies this model to the mesh of a B-spline surface to simulate elastic and plastic surfaces. This model consists of a set of points in space connected by springs to maintain distance relationships and by hinges to maintain orientation relationships. This thesis provides a background of previous work, describes the eplastics model in detail, discusses implementation and demonstrates eplastics by presenting the results of various test cases.