Metamorphosis of arbitrary triangular meshes

Three-dimensional metamorphosis (or morphing) establishes a smooth transition from a source object to a target object. The primary issue in 3D metamorphosis is to establish surface correspondence between the source and target objects, by which each point on the surface of the source object maps to a point on the surface of the target object. Having established this correspondence, we can generate a smooth transition by interpolating corresponding points from the source to the target positions. We handle 3D geometric metamorphosis between two objects represented as triangular meshes. To improve the quality of 3D morphing between two triangular meshes, we particularly consider the following two issues: 1) metamorphosis of arbitrary meshes; 2) metamorphosis with user control. We can address the first issue using our recently proposed method based on harmonic mapping (T. Kanai et al., 1998). In that earlier work, we developed each of the two meshes (topologically equivalent to a disk and having geometrically complicated shapes), into a 2D unit circle by harmonic mapping. Combining those two embeddings produces surface correspondence between the two meshes. However, this method doesn't consider the second issue: how to let the user control surface correspondence. The article develops an effective method for 3D morphing between two arbitrary meshes of the same topology. We extend our previously proposed method to achieve user control of surface correspondence.