

As-Rigid-As-Possible Shape Manipulation (awesome video) - nickb
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1M_oyUEOHK8

======
brianlash
Whoah, that's so awesome. The M&M Man manipulation is nuts.

Jeff Han demos something really similar -- almost to the T -- in his TED
presentation of the Microsoft Surface technology. He even mentions "the mesh,"
which leads me to wonder if it's the same rigid-as-possible approach. See
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKh1Rv0PlOQ> at around 7:30.

~~~
GHFigs
Nitpick: Jeff Han is affiliated with NYU and his own company, Perceptive
Pixel, not Microsoft.

~~~
brianlash
Yep, you're right.

------
iamelgringo
Adobe After Effects CS3 uses the algorithm or something very very similar in
it's Puppet tool. I used it quite extensively last summer doing this animation
for the Heinz "Top This" commercial competition.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DJQ9PuT4I8>

We didn't win, but my wife (the director) did get a personalized bottle of
ketchup out of the deal.

If you want to see more of the Puppet tool, there's a tutorial here:
[http://www.metacafe.com/watch/885847/puppet_tool_in_adobe_af...](http://www.metacafe.com/watch/885847/puppet_tool_in_adobe_after_effects_cs3/)

Video of puppet tool in use start around minute 2:45

------
DaniFong
This is mindblowingly great. I guess it goes to show how intuitive [physical]
models can be if you choose the right thing [energy function] to do [to
minimize], and design an algorithm to successfully do so.

It's beautiful that they chose rigidity too -- it is an extremely natural
behavior that most biological things would default to. And it's great fun to
play with!

------
deathbyzen
That's a neat little tech and it reminded me of something I saw on Gizmodo a
while back called "smart scene resizing."

[http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/innovation/smart-scene-carving-
re...](http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/innovation/smart-scene-carving-resizes-
images-without-distortion-292268.php)

------
noonespecial
I _just_ got done wishing that this would happen:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=197781>

And here it is. Nice.

------
michael_dorfman
The video is quite cool, but I'd be much more impressed by a link to a paper
describing the algorithm in detail. Does anyone know if/where this work has
been published?

~~~
GHFigs
Takeo Igarashi, Tomer Moscovich, John F. Hughes, "As-Rigid-As-Possible Shape
Manipulation", ACM Transactions on Computer Graphics, Vol.24, No.3, ACM
SIGGRAPH 2005, Los Angels, USA, 2005.

[The PDF is here.](<http://www-ui.is.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~takeo/papers/rigid.pdf>)

------
bprater
Amazing. I bet kids would love to play with this!

~~~
Hexstream
Heck, _I_ would love to play with this!

------
g4ld3r
I was fortunate enough to get a demo of this by the people working on it at
the university of Tokyo in April. Our CS class was on a study tour in Japan.
The technology is really amazing, especially when used to record animations.
They also had other cool stuff, like a 3D leaves/flowers/trees design tool.

