An interactive deformation technique with triangles and distance functions

Due to the character of the original source materials and the nature of batch digitization, quality control issues may be present in this document. Please report any quality issues you encounter to digital@library.tamu.edu, referencing the URI of the item.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 31-32).Issued also on microfiche from Lange Micrographics.In this thesis, a new interactive deformation technique is presented. In this technique, triangles are used as deformation primitives. User defined source and target triangles define local coordinates. These local coordinates determine a unique translation vector for any given point in space. A set of blending functions is provided to effectively interpolate these translation vectors from each triangle to compute a combined translation. These combined translation vectors are used to transform each control point. In two dimensional space, each control point can be assigned to the vertices of a texture mapped grid. Deformation of the grid then provides interactive deformation of the texture that is mapped to the grid. In three dimensional space, the vertices that make up a polygonal representation of a model can be deformed interactively