The interactive editing and contouring of empirical fields

A system for the interactive editing and contouring of surfaces derived from empirical fields is described. The approach taken begins with the representation of a field as a general-order, nonuniform, tensor-product, B-spline surface. It provides an interactive display for editing the surface by control-vertex manipulation and a contouring algorithm that is specifically designed for the fast and robust contouring of B-spline surfaces. Interactive editing of the resulting model is feasible because of the local nature of editing changes when B-splines are used. The use of nonuniform B-splines gives the flexibility required to model highly irregular data efficiently