A Revisit of Shape Editing Techniques: From the Geometric to the Neural Viewpoint

Abstract

3D shape editing is widely used in a range of applications such as movie production, computer games and computer aided design. It is also a popular research topic in computer graphics and computer vision. In past decades, researchers have developed a series of editing methods to make the editing process faster, more robust, and more reliable. Traditionally, the deformed shape is determined by the optimal transformation and weights for an energy formulation. With increasing availability of 3D shapes on the Internet, data-driven methods were proposed to improve the editing results. More recently as the deep neural networks became popular, many deep learning based editing methods have been developed in this field, which are naturally data-driven. We mainly survey recent research studies from the geometric viewpoint to those emerging neural deformation techniques and categorize them into organic shape editing methods and man-made model editing methods. Both traditional methods and recent neural network based methods are reviewed.