Fast and intuitive metamorphosis of 3D polyhedral models using SMCC mesh merging scheme

A very fast and intuitive approach to generate the metamorphosis of two genus 0 3D polyhedral models is presented. There are two levels of correspondence specified by animators to control morphs. The higher level requires the animators to specify scatter features to decompose the input models into several corresponding patches. The lower level optionally allows the animators to specify extra features on each corresponding patch for finer correspondence control. Once these two levels of correspondence are established, the proposed schemes automatically and efficiently establish a complete one-to-one correspondence between two models. We propose a novel technique called SMCC (Structures of Minimal Contour Coverage) to efficiently and robustly merge corresponding embeddings. The SMCC scheme can compute merging in linear time. The performance of the proposed methods is comparable to or better than state-of-the-art 3D polyhedral metamorphosis. We demonstrate several examples of aesthetically pleasing morphs, which can be created very quickly and intuitively.