3-DIMENSIONAL GEOMETRIC METAMORPHOSIS BASED ON HARMONIC MAPS

Animations with deforming objects are frequently used in computer grap hics applications, Metamorphosis (or morphing) of 3D objects is one of the techniques that realize a shape transformation between two or mor e existing objects. We present a new algorithm for 3D geometric metamo rphosis between two objects based on harmonic mapping. Our algorithm i s applicable to arbitrary polyhedra that are homeomorphic to a 3D sphe re or a 2D disk. In our algorithm, each of the two 3D objects is first embedded in the circular disk on the plane. This embedded model has t he same graph structure as its 3D objects. We can overlap two embedded models and use the correspondence established between the two objects to generate intermediate objects. The user only specifies a boundary loop on an object and a vertex on that boundary to control interpolati on.