It is becoming a common trend that many designers work on a very complex assembly together in a collaborative environment. In this environment, every designer should be able to see the whole assembly in a full detail or in a rough shape at least. Even though the hardware technology is being improved very rapidly, it is very difficult to display a very complex assembly at a speed to allow smooth interactions for designers. This problem could be solved if a designer could manipulate his portion of the assembly in a full resolution while the remaining portion of the assembly is displayed in a rough resolution. It is also desired that the remaining portion is converted to the full resolution when needed. To realize this environment, the capabilities to simplify the portions of an assembly and to reset to the original resolution should be added to the current CAD systems. Thus operators realizing multi-resolution on B-rep are proposed in this paper. They are: wrap-around, smooth-out, and thinning operator. Through appropriately applying these operators sequentially, an assembly model of any desired resolution can be easily generated. Of course, the assembly can go back to the finer resolution. In this paper, the data structures and the processes to realize these operators are described and a prototype modeling system with these operators is also demonstrated.
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