Shape-Preserving Animation of Deformable Objects

We present a novel approach for animating elasti- cally deformable solids in a shape-preserving man- ner. Standard approaches to animate this kind of ob- jects are based on classic FEM discretizations of the elasticity theory, combined with embedding tech- niques to deform highly-detailed object geometries. However, these approaches are usually not able to preserve fine geometric features at sub-element scales, showing visually disturbing deformations. We propose to use Green Coordinates (GC) for the representation of the deformation field to get shape- preservation 'by construction' and describe how to discretize the elastic energy using these cage-based coordinates. By linearizing the deformation field we arrive at a simple approach which leads to just a few additional terms compared to classic FEM dis- cretizations.