Automatic Line Handles for Freeform Deformation

Abstract

Interactive freeform surface deformation methods allow to explore the space of possible shapes using simple control structures. While recent advances in variational editing provide high quality deformations, designing control structures remains a time-consuming manual process. We propose a new automatic control structure generation based on the observation that the most salient visual structures of a surface, such as the one exploited in Line Drawing methods, are tightly linked to the potential deformations it may undergo. Our basic idea is to build control structures from those lines in order to provide users with an automatic set of deformation handles to grab and manipulate, avoiding the tedious task of region selection and handle positioning. The resulting interface inherits view-dependency and adaptivity from line definitions, reduces significantly the modeling session time in a number of scenarii, and remains fully compatible with classical handle-based deformations.