Pointshop 3D: An interactive system for point-based surface editing

We present a system for interactive shape and appearance editing of 3D point-sampled geometry. By generalizing conventional 2D pixel editors, our system supports a great variety of different interaction techniques to alter shape and appearance of 3D point models, including cleaning, texturing, sculpting, carving, filtering, and resampling. One key ingredient of our framework is a novel concept for interactive point cloud parameterization allowing for distortion minimal and aliasing-free texture mapping. A second one is a dynamic, adaptive resampling method which builds upon a continuous reconstruction of the model surface and its attributes. These techniques allow us to transfer the full functionality of 2D image editing operations to the irregular 3D point setting. Our system reads, processes, and writes point-sampled models without intermediate tesselation. It is intended to complement existing low cost 3D scanners and point rendering pipelines for efficient 3D content creation.