Polygon Inflation for Animated Models: a Method for the Extrusion of Arbitrary Polygon Meshes

A method for the extrusion of arbitrary polygon meshes is introduced. This method can be applied to model a large class of complex 3-D closed surfaces. It consists of defining a (typically small) set of connected polygons in 3-D that form a skeleton of the final object, and assigning extrusion distances to all polygons. The two sides of a polygon may have different extrusion distances. An automatic extrusion algorithm constructs a closed 3-D polygon mesh around the skeleton, making use of the indicated extrusion distances. We call this process inflating the polygons of the skeleton. Unlike traditional extrusion, the method works for non-planar skeleton configurations, and it also supports branching skeleton structures (i.e. edges with more than two incident polygons).