ARAP Revisited Discretizing the Elastic Energy using Intrinsic Voronoi Cells

Abstract

As-rigid-as-possible (ARAP) surface modelling is widely used for interactive deformation of triangle meshes. We show that ARAP can be interpreted as minimizing a discretization of an elastic energy based on non-conforming elements defined over dual orthogonal cells of the mesh. Using the intrinsic Voronoi cells rather than an orthogonal dual of the extrinsic mesh guarantees that the energy is non-negative over each cell. We represent the intrinsic Delaunay edges extrinsically as polylines over the mesh, encoded in barycentric coordinates relative to the mesh vertices. This modification of the original ARAP energy, which we term iARAP, remedies problems stemming from non-Delaunay edges in the original approach. Unlike the spokes-and-rims version of the ARAP approach it is less susceptible to the triangulation of the surface. We provide examples of deformations generated with iARAP and contrast them with other versions of ARAP. We also discuss the properties of the Laplace-Beltrami operator implicitly introduced with the new discretization.