Abstract
A new approach to the deformation problem for nonrigid objects is presented in this paper, in which we represent a surface as continuous bi-cubic patches and then map the boundary curves of each patch into quaternion space, interpolate the scaling and rotation operations thus facilitated, and then remap the patch surface to get the required deformation. This technique can also be used to transform a skeleton for the 3-D object to give dynamic deformationa and in particular to give a simple method of handling the squash and stretch effects which are commonly used in traditional animation. With enhanced control over orientation and scaling we can deal with more complex movements of deformed objects. Extended applications to some special cases of deformation are also given in the paper.