Editorial

Dear colleagues,

This special issue includes five revised and extended papers originally presented at the sixth International Conference on Shape Modeling and Applications 2004 in Genoa, Italy, June 7-9, 2004. This conference was initiated by Professor Tosiyasu Kunii and took place at the University of Aizu in Japan in 1997 and 1999. From 2001 the SMI conference became an annual event with the venue changing circularly from Asia to Europe and to America. It also included the Eurographics/ACM SIGGRAPH Workshop on Implicit Surfaces as a specific session. In year 2004, the conference for the first time was scheduled within the International Convention on Shapes and Solids 2004, with the aim of bringing together the two major international conferences in the modeling area: Shape Modeling International and the ACM Symposium on Solid Modeling and Applications.

The conference has been organized by the Institute of Applied Mathematics and Information Technologies, Department of Genova, belonging to the Italian National Research Council (CNR) in cooperation with ACM SIGGRAPH, the Eurographics, and the Computer Graphics Society. In response to the call for papers, 79 full papers were submitted out of which 29 full papers were selected for presentation and inclusion in the proceedings. For the first time, 11 short papers have been selected among the submitted short and full papers.

The SMI conference is quite diverse in its topics. The SMI’04 proceedings included papers on modeling implicit surfaces, surface meshes, discrete point sets and subdivision surfaces, shape retrieval, feature-based modeling and deformations, interactive modeling. The papers selected for this special issue deal with processing and topological analysis of polygonal meshes, and shape modeling applications in computer-aided design and rapid prototyping.

SMI 2004 program co-chairs:

Franca Giannini

Alexander Pasko