Metamorphosis of Arbitrary Triangular Meshes

Recently, animations with deforming objects have been frequently used in various computer graphics applications. Metamorphosis (or morphing) of three-dimensional objects is one of the techniques which realizes shape transformation between two or more existing objects. In this paper, we present an efficient framework for metamorphosis between two topologically equivalent, arbitrary meshes with the control of surface correspondences by the user. The basic idea of our method is to partition meshes according to the reference shapes specified by the user, whereby vertex-to-vertex correspondences between the two meshes can be specified. Each of the partitioned meshes is embedded into a polygonal region on the plane with harmonic mapping. Those embedded meshes have the same graph structure as their original meshes. By overlapping those two embedded meshes, we can establish correspondence between them. Based on this correspondence, metamorphosis is achieved by interpolating the corresponding vertices from one mesh to the other. We demonstrate that the minimum control of surface correspondences by the user generates sophisticated results of the interpolation between two meshes.