To appear at the Eurographics Symposium on Geometry Processing (2007)
Alexander Belyaev, Michael Garland (Editors)
As-Rigid-As-Possible Surface Modeling
Olga Sorkine and Marc Alexa
TU Berlin, Germany
Abstract
Modeling tasks, such as surface deformation and editing, can be analyzed by observing the local behavior of the
surface. We argue that defining a modeling operation by asking for rigidity of the local transformations is useful
in various settings. Such formulation leads to a non-linear, yet conceptually simple energy formulation, which is
to be minimized by the deformed surface under particular modeling constraints. We devise a simple iterative mesh
editing scheme based on this principle, that leads to detail-preserving and intuitive deformations. Our algorithm
is effective and notably easy to implement, making it attractive for practical modeling applications.
Categories and Subject Descriptors (according to ACM CCS): I.3.5 [Computer Graphics]: Computational Geometr y
and Object Modeling – geometric algorithms, languages, and systems
1. Introduction
When we talk about shape, we usually refer to a property
that does not change with the orientation or position of an
object. In that sense, preserving shape means that an object
is only rotated or translated, but not scaled or sheared. In
the context of interactive shape modeling it is clear, how-
ever, that a shape has to to be stretched or sheared to satisfy
the modeling constraints placed by the user. Users intuitively
expect the deformation to preserve the shape of the object
locally, as happens with physical objects when a smooth,
large-scale deformation is applied to them. In other words,
small parts of the shape should change as rigidly as possible.
Our goal is to create a shape deformation framework that
is directly based upon the above principle. When local sur-
face deformations induced by modeling operations are close
to rigid, surface details tend to be preserved. This is a highly
important property for surface editing schemes that are
meant to be applied to complex, detailed surfaces, such as
those coming from scanning real 3D objects or from sophis-
ticated virtual sculpting tools. Recently, detail-preserving
surface editing techniques have been receiving much atten-
tion in geometric modeling research [Sor06,BS07], thanks to
the increasing proliferation of such detailed models, which
usually come in the form of irregular polyg onal meshes.
We propose the following conceptual model derived from
the principle of local rigidity: The surface of the object is
covered with small overlapping cells. An ideal deformation
seeks to keep the transformation for the surface in each cell
as rigid as possible. Overlap of the cells is necessary to avoid
surface stretching or shearing at the boundary of the cells.
Figure 1: Large deformation obtained by translating a
single vertex constraint (in yellow) using our as-rigid-as-
possible technique.
For this modeling framework to become practical we shall
define how rigidity is measured in each of the cells. A nat-
ural choice is to estimate the rigid transformation for each
cell based on corresponding points on the initial and the de-
formed surfaces, then apply this rigid transformation to the
original shape and measure the deviation to the deformed
shape. Note that estimating a linear transformation from the
corresponding surface points and then measuring its non-
orthogonality is not a good measure of rigidity: an optimal
approximate linear transformation of an arbitrary deforma-
tion could well be orthogonal. Consequently, in order to de-
fine locally shape-preserving deformation, a direct optimiza-
tion of the rigid transformation should be performed instead.
Assuming we can measure deviation from rigidity in each
cell, setting up the modeling framework requires deciding
on the size and placement (or, equivalently, overlap) of
c
The Eurographics Association 2007.