Shapes is a package for volume-oriented CSG-style Geometry Modelling

Shapes — A library for creating implicit 3D geometries

The Shapes packages permits to describe 3D volumes as iso-surfaces of a scalar function. Novel features of Shapes are the possibility to employ spline curves as basic building blocks, and a natural and parameterized blending technique, making smooth surfaces the default rather then an add-on as in conventional CSG approaches. Thus, it is ideal for modeling smooth objects, for instance mock-ups of blood vessels for testing medical simulation.

Such implicit representations have certain advantages. Most importantly, they permit to model rather arbitrary smooth surfaces (which would be difficult or impossible to directly represent analytically) without resolution issues (which would arise when representing the surface by an approximation such as a surface mesh). Geometries defined by the Shapes package are a perfect input to volumetric mesh generators such as Mesh&More.

Shapes was developed jointly by Fokko Beekhof (lead developer) and Guntram Berti (mathematical background). It is available under the GPL from the University of Geneva.