CR-Morph: Controllable Rigid Morphing for 2D Animation

Abstract

This paper presents a rigidity-preserving morphing technique that blends a pair of 2D shapes in a controllable manner. The morphing is controllable in two aspects: 1) motion dynamics in the interpolation sequences can be effectively enhanced through an intuitive skeleton control and 2) not only the boundaries but also the interior features of the source and target shapes are precisely aligned during the morphing. We introduce a new compatible triangulation algorithm to decompose the source and target shapes into isomorphic triangles. Moreover, a robust and motion-controllable rigidity-preserving transformation scheme is proposed to blend the compatible triangulations, ultimately leading to a morphing sequence which is appearance-preserving and with the desired motion dynamics. Our approach constitutes a powerful and easy-to-use morphing tool for two-dimensional animation. We demonstrate its versatility, effectiveness and visual accuracy through a variety of examples and comparisons to prior work.