Mesh Morphing
In collaboration with Dr. Chao Peng, I developed a novel mesh morphing algorithm that can generate feature-aligned morphs between 2 or more genus-0 meshes. The algorithm works by first parameterizing the input meshes into a spherical domain, reshaping the parameterizations to achieve alignment of user picked features (e.g., eyes, nose, etc) in the spherical domain, constructing a new supermesh that accomodates features from all input meshes, and using the supermesh to generate output meshes with exactly the same topology. This video shows what the morphing animation looks like.
Here’s a short visual summary of the process - shows progressive mesh simplification and refinement leading up to a spherical parameterization, and the alignment and remeshing after parameterization.
Here are more visual examples of morphing sequences, including 3-way morphs.
We also extended this approach to add support for texture re-mapping and morphing.
Finally, here’s a video showing how this approach can be combined with other animation techniques like skeletal animation.