Mesh Deformation

Generating and manipulating surfaces is one of the central issues in various applications of computer graphics and digital entertainment. As one of these operations for surface generating, deformations allow the user to treat an object as if it were constructed from a special type of topological putty or clay, which may be bent, twisted, tapered, compressed, expanded, and otherwise transformed repeatedly into a final shape. They are highly intuitive and easily visualized operations that simulate some important manufacturing processes for fabricating objects, such as the bending of bar stock and sheet metal.

Recent progress of deformation techniques focus on mesh deformation. Although for different computing tasks, different surface representations are employed to reveal different geometric, physical, plausible, or perceptual properties of the shape to be handled. The polygonal meshes become fundamental digital media through the whole geometric processing pipeline because of its convenience of acquisition and rendering. However, a pure mesh representation with its vertex positions defined in global coordinate system is challenging for deforming shapes while caring details. Hence researchers have developed several efficient ways to deform mesh surfaces.

Keywords: mesh deformation; deformation methods; free form deformation; multiresolution; Poisson equation; Laplacian operator