Volumetric modification of solid CAD models independent of design features

When feature information is lost during a data transfer, the advantage of feature-based modeling becomes invalid. After that, even a small modification for a feature of the model becomes purely dependent on geometric and topological manipulations. The existing methods for the local modifications such as moving and tapering faces basically make use of ‘tweaking’, which is the technique to replace the surface of a face with different one. However, tweaking is limited to the modifications that do not involve topological changes in the model. Due to this limitation, tweaking does not work properly when local modifications involve topological changes. In this paper, a new volumetric method for the local modification for 3D CAD models is presented. This method can handle local modification involving topological changes by first separating the volume of feature from the model using the volume decomposition, and then uniting the modified feature with the model.