A Volumetric Approach to Interactive Shape Editing

We present a novel approach to real-time shape editing that produces physically plausible deformations using an efficient and easy-to-implement volumetric approach. Our algorithm alternates between a linear tetrahedral Laplacian deformation step and a differential update in which rotational transformations are approximated. By means of this iterative process we can achieve non-linear deformation results while having to solve only linear equation systems. The differential update step relies on estimating the rotational component of the deformation relative to the rest pose. This makes the method very stable as the shape can be reverted to its rest pose even after extreme deformations. Only a few point handles or area handles imposing an orientation are needed to achieve high quality deformations, which makes the approach intuitive to use. We show that our technique is well suited for interactive shape manipulation and also provides an elegant way to animate models with captured motion data.