Drag-And-Drop Surface Composition

A novel approach to drag-and-drop composition of point-sampled surfaces is described which allows a complex surface feature to be interactively selected and dragged to a new target region. We automatically fill the hole left behind and deform the feature such that it conforms to the target surface. Both of these operations are implemented using a new geometric deformation technique which preserves surface detail in a manner qualitatively similar to recent variational techniques, but is based on a forward front-propagation that can be arbitrarily parameterized, providing artists with easilymanipulable real-time control over how holes are filled and features deformed. This method is simple to implement, applies to arbitrary polygon soups, and can be adapted to significantly improve the robustness of the Discrete Exponential Map parameterization algorithm. We demonstrate the utility of our approach in a dragand-drop mesh composition tool which can be used to to quickly assemble complex 3D models from arbitrary input geometry.