Three-dimensional morphing of similar shapes using a template mesh

Abstract

Shape morphing is the process of transforming a source shape into a target shape, through a series of intermediate shapes. There are two important problems to be considered in three-dimensional shape morphing: conforming mesh generation and path interpolation. In this paper, a novel approach in which a template mesh is mapped directly to the target mesh is proposed for the efficient treatment of the conforming mesh generation problem. Our mapping technique is based on a shape deformation method using an implicit function and the well-known mesh smoothing scheme, so the implementation of the method is very simple and robust. After mapping the source mesh to the target mesh, i.e., after obtaining a consistent mesh parameterization of the two shapes, the intermediate shapes are obtained by linear interpolation of the modified Laplacian coordinates of the source and target meshes. We demonstrate many examples of morphing between various shapes, including a model of the human head, a head sculpture model, and models of the human body in different poses to show the validity and effectiveness of the proposed method.