A Method of Automatic Cage Generation for Shape Deformation by Using Elastic Models

Laplacian-based mesh processing technique is a kind of shape deformation in Computer Graphics modeling. It is hard to deform shapes which constructed by a lot of vertices in real time, because computational cost is high. A cages-based mesh deformation method is used in order to control the computational cost. A cage is a polyhedron which envelops an original dense model and is constructed by few meshes. The main advantages of using cages in shape deformations are controlling high speed computation. Currently, the coarse cage is constructed mainly by hand, and the construction usually takes several hours, even longer. Furthermore, when the shape of the model to be deformed is complex, it is very hard to construct its coarse cage by hand. Therefore it is important to develop a convenient method to generate the coarse cage enveloping a model. In this paper, we propose a method of automatic cage generation.