COMPUTER ANIMATION AND VIRTUAL WORLDS
Comp. Anim. Virtual Worlds 2009; 20: 175–184
Published online 1 June 2009 in Wiley InterScience
(www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/cav.285
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2D shape manipulation via
topology-aware rigid grid
By Wenwu Yang and Jieqing Feng
*
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This paper presents a new method which allows user to manipulate a two-dimensional
shape in an intuitive and flexible way. The shape is discretized as a regular grid. User places
handles on the grid and manipulates the shape by moving the handles to the desired
positions. To meet the constraints of the user’s manipulation, the grid is then deformed in an
as-rigid-as-possible way. However, this straightforward approach tends to produce
unnatural deformations when the grid resolution is not high enough to capture the
topological structure of the shape. In the proposed method, the regular grid is trimmed and
only the cells that are inside the fatty regions of the shape are preserved, namely “interior
grid.” When user manipulates the shape, the interior grid and the shape boundary curve are
deformed with minimum distortions. To make the deformations of the interior grid and the
boundary curve consistent, a junction energy is introduced. In this way, the unnatural
deformation effects could be effectively removed and the physically plausible results can be
obtained. Meanwhile, the proposed approach provides user an intuitive and simple way to
adjust the shape global and local stiffnesses. The deformation is formulated as an energy
minimization problem. The energy function is non-quadratic and could be efficiently solved
using an iterative solver with the fast summation technique that exploits the interior grid
and boundary curve regularities. In addition, the method could be easily extended to
manipulate curves and stick figures. Experimental results demonstrate the capability and
flexibility of the new method. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Received: 24 March 2009; Accepted: 24 March 2009
KEY WORDS: shape manipulation; topology-aware; tunable stiffness; nonlinear optimization
Introduction
The 2D shape manipulation provides user an intuitive
way to move, rotate, stretch, and bend a 2D image
or drawing interactively. It has been proven to be an
versatile tool in various applications, and is currently
prevalent in commercial video processing softwares and
vector graphics softwares such as Adobe After Effects
©
,
Adobe Illustrator
©
, as well as cartoon animation
softwares such as ToonBoom
©
.
Free-form deformation (FFD) and skeleton-based
techniques are two prevalent methods for shape
manipulation. They manipulate the object by editing the
*Correspondence to: J. Feng, State Key Laboratory of CAD&CG,
Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, P. R. China.
E-mail: jqfeng@cad.zju.edu.cn; wwyang@cad.zju.edu.cn
pre-defined lattice or skeleton. However, manipulating
densely distributed control points in the lattice is a
laborious work and defining an appropriate skeleton is
not trivial especially for the object with an ambiguous
joint structure.
Recently, a wide class of methods,
1–4
which provide
users an intuitive interface, have been proposed. These
methods allow direct manipulation on an object by
editing the specified constraints in a click-and-drag
way. Then the shape is deformed locally or globally in
a physically plausible way; meanwhile the deformed
shape satisfies the constraints as closely as possible.
Whilst these methods all aim to minimize the local
distortions of the shape interiors during the deformation
(i.e., as rigid as possible deformation), one of differences
among them is the underlying shape tessellation
structure on which the local distortion measurements
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Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.