Shape Deformation via Multiresolution Editing

Posing a hand mesh without any rigging or skeleton: fix a few vertex handles — the wrist and the fingertips — move them to a new position, and let the rest of the surface follow smoothly while keeping its fine detail.

Try it live

This runs in your browser: the wrist handle is pinned, and the Curl fingers and Thumb controls rigidly rotate the finger/thumb handles. Smooth harmonic weights (solved from the mesh’s cotangent Laplacian) propagate each motion across the free surface, so the skin’s fine detail rides along.

How it works

Deforming the raw mesh directly would smear away wrinkles and knuckle detail. Multiresolution editing avoids that by separating the pose from the detail:

1. S — the original hand mesh.
2. B — a smooth base surface: S with its detail removed, computed by minimizing the bi-Laplacian energy $\Delta^2$ with the handles held fixed.
3. B′ — the new pose: the ring- and pinky-finger handles of B are rotated and translated, and the smooth surface is re-solved.
4. S′ — the final result: the detail that was removed in step 2, $(S - B)$, is added back onto B′.

Because the detail rides on top of the smooth base, the fingers curl naturally and the skin detail follows the bend instead of stretching.

Try it

All four stages are shown side by side in the interactive scene — drag to orbit, scroll to zoom: