Our Implementation of Superquadrics


Goals

Our main goal for this project was to create a fast, flexible implementation of graphic primitives for superquadric drawing. Using C++ we created a well organized class library that makes incorporating superquadric objects into OpenGL based graphical projects very simple.

Getting from the mathematical definitions of the 4 superquadric types to real polygon based representations in an efficient way was no simple task; our algorithm is described later.




Having created the framework code for superquadrics, we decided to write three interactive demonstration programs: demo1, demo2 and demo3. There are so many things that can be done with superquadrics that designing a single application to demonstrate the wide range of features which superquadrics embody would have been too difficult to design and use. However with 3 simple applications we are able to provide a good view of the power and flexibility of superquadrics as a 3D object type, at the same time showing how our code provides a convenient frame work for further development.