A Remeshing Approach to Multiresolution Modeling

Providing a thorough mathematical foundation, multiresolution modeling is the standard approach for global surface deformations that preserve fine surface details in an intuitive and plausible manner. A given shape is decomposed into a smooth low-frequency base surface and high-frequency detail information. Adding these details back onto a deformed version of the base surface results in the desired modification. Using a suitable detail encoding, the connectivity of the base surface is not restricted to be the same as that of the original surface. We propose to exploit this degree of freedom to improve both robustness and efficiency of multiresolution shape editing. In several approaches the modified base surface is computed by solving a linear system of discretized Laplacians. By remeshing the base surface such that the Voronoi areas of its vertices are equalized, we turn the unsymmetric surface-related linear system into a symmetric one, such that simpler, more robust, and more efficient solvers can be applied. The high regularity of the remeshed base surface further removes numerical problems caused by mesh degeneracies and results in a better discretization of the Laplacian operator. The remeshing is performed on the low-frequency base surface only, while the connectivity of the original surface is kept fixed. Hence, this functionality can be encapsulated inside a multiresolution kernel and is thus completely hidden from the user.