Real-Time Shape Editing using Radial Basis Functions

Current surface-based methods for interactive freeform editing of high resolution 3D models are very powerful, but at the same time require a certain minimum tessellation or sampling quality in order to guarantee sufficient robustness. In contrast to this, space deformation techniques do not depend on the underlying surface representation and hence are affected neither by its complexity nor by its quality aspects. However, while analogously to surface-based methods high quality deformations can be derived from variational optimization, the major drawback lies in the computation and evaluation, which is considerably more expensive for volumetric space deformations. In this paper we present techniques which allow us to use triharmonic radial basis functions for real-time freeform shape editing. An incremental least-squares method enables us to approximately solve the involved linear systems in a robust and efficient manner and by precomputing a special set of deformation basis functions we are able to significantly reduce the per-frame costs. Moreover, evaluating these linear basis functions on the GPU finally allows us to deform highly complex polygon meshes or point-based models at a rate of 30M vertices or 13M splats per second, respectively.