Placement of Deformable Objects

Abstract

With the increasing complexity of photorealistic scenes, the question of building and placing objects in three-dimensional scenes is becoming ever more difficult. While the question of placement of rigid objects has captured the attention of researchers in the past, this work presents an intuitive and interactive scheme to properly place deformable objects with the aid of free-form deformation tools. The presented scheme can also be used to animate the locomotion of nonrigid objects, most noticeably animals, and adapt the motion to arbitrary terrain. The automatic construction of our free-form deformation tool is completely hidden from the end user, and hence, circumvents the difficulties typically faced in manipulating these deformation functions. Further, a precise bound on the error that is introduced by applying free-form deformations to polygonal models is presented, along with an almost-optimal adaptive refinement algorithm to achieve a certain accuracy in the mapping.