Motivation

 

In 1996, the University ofBath and Information Geometers Ltd. released SVLIS [1] -- a commercial geometric modeller that uses an entirely CSG representation -- written by Adrian Bowyer and other members of the University of Bath geometric modelling group (g_mod).

In parallel to SVLIS, g_mod are currently developing a powerful new technique, based on an idea of John Woodwark's which uses geometric dimensions to represent degrees of freedom, resulting in models which may have many more than three dimensions [2, 3]. Initial investigations into applications of Woodwark's method (which include feature recognition, symmetry detection, packing, minkowski sums and configuration-space mapping) by Stephen Parry-Barwick, used hypersvlis , a hard-coded nine-dimensional extension of SVLIS, capable of representing a three-dimensional object exercising six degrees of freedom (three translation, three rotation) However, in order to solve a larger range of problems, a more flexible and extendible modeller was required.