Special effects: Efficient and scalable encoding of the 3D metamorphosis animation with MESHGRID
 
Special effects: Efficient and scalable encoding of the 3D metamorphosis animation with MESHGRID ■
 
Alexandru Ioan Salomie, Alexandru Ioan Salomie, Alexandru Ioan Salomie, Rudi Deklerck, Rudi Deklerck, Rudi Deklerck, Dan Cernea, Dan Cernea, Dan Cernea, Aneta Markova, Aneta Markova, Aneta Markova, Adrian Munteanu, Adrian Munteanu, Adrian Munteanu, Peter Schelkens, Peter Schelkens, Peter Schelkens, Jan Cornelis, Jan Cornelis, Jan Cornelis
 
Abstract ■

Metamorphosis or morphing is a technique to accomplish a gradual shape transformation between a source object and a target object. This technique is usually used for animation, i.e., to create some special effects, but it can be also employed as a modeling tool where some existing shapes are combined in order to obtain new shapes. Several interactive or automatic morphing techniques were designed in the past but always with a specific object representation in mind. In this paper we propose a generic framework for 3D morphing, that allows multi-resolution surface extraction and provides a hybrid (surface-volume) dynamic representation which is suitable for encoding the static models, for supporting different morphing methods, and for encoding the intermediate 3D frames (generated during the morphing process) in a MPEG-4 stream.