“Point-based rigid shape interpolation” by Baxter

Nearly rigid interpolation has been shown to generate good interpo- lation results for both 2D and 3D shape morphing problems [Alexa  et al. 2000]. The key to success of most proposed techniques like  that of Alexa, et al. is generating a high-quality compatible triangu- lations of the source and target shapes in 2D and compatible tetra- hedralizations in 3D. A number of good methods are available for  the 2D case, however, it is more difficult in 3D. The 3D rigid mor- phing example demonstrated by Alexa et al. [2000] has, by con- struction, a fairly trivial compatible tetrahedralization; however, for  real-world cases, where the inputs are typically 3D meshes without a priori tetrahedralizations, the task is much more difficult.  

1. Alexa, M., Cohen-Or, D., and Levin, D. 2000. As-rigid-as-possible shape interpolation. In SIGGRAPH ’00, 157–164.
2. Müller, M., Keiser, R., Nealen, A., Pauly, M., Gross, M., and Alexa, M. 2004. Point based animation of elastic, plastic and melting objects. In SCA ’04, 141–151.