D. Kravtsov, O. Fryazinov, V. Adzhiev, A. Pasko & P. Comninos, Controlled Metamorphosis Between Skeleton-Driven Animated Polyhedral Meshes of Arbitrary Topologies, Computer Graphics Forum, Volume 33, Issue 1, February 2014, pages 64–72

PDF (preprint) is coming soon, the definite version is available at wileyonlinelibrary.com.

Abstract: Enabling animators to smoothly transform between animated meshes of differing topologies is a long-standing problem in geometric modelling and computer animation. In this paper, we propose a new hybrid approach built upon the advantages of scalar-field-based models (often called implicit surfaces) which can easily change their topology by changing their defining scalar field. Given two meshes, animated by their rigging-skeletons, we associate each mesh with its own approximating implicit surface. This implicit surface moves synchronously with the mesh. The shape-metamorphosis process is performed in several steps: first we collapse the two meshes to their corresponding approximating implicit surfaces, then we transform between the two implicit surfaces and finally we inverse transition from the resulting metamorphosed implicit surface to the target mesh. The examples presented in this paper demonstrating the results of the proposed technique were implemented using an in-house plug-in for Maya.