Abstract
Shape deformation is an important ingredient in a variety of applications, such as graphics design, simulation, and interaction. It is also fundamental to character animations commonly seen in games and animated films. The ability to create appealing deformations with simple and intuitive user controls would greatly shorten design cycles and reduce manual effort in these applications. In this talk, I will elaborate on a shape deformation paradigm where the user controls the deformation via a coarse polyhedron (called the cage) around the shape. Although introduced only recently, cage-based deformations have quickly gained popularity in the graphics community due to a number of favorable properties in comparison with previous techniques, such as computational efficiency, high quality of deformations and the easy of user control. I will present our research on both the theoretical foundation of cage-based deformations, a subject area known as generalized barycentric coordinates, as well as applications of the cage-based paradigm in character animation, especially for simplifying the design and re-use of animation styles.