Normal-Driven Spherical Shape Analogies

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel 3D shape stylization method using surface normals to define shape analogies, allowing flexible deformation of shapes into various styles within a unified framework.

Contribution

It introduces a shape analogy framework based on surface normals for stylizing 3D geometries, enabling plug-and-play style transfer with exemplar shapes or style descriptions.

Findings

Enables deformation of 3D shapes into different styles using normal-based shape analogies.

Provides a flexible, unified framework for 3D shape stylization.

Introduces a concept analogous to material captures in rendering.

Abstract

This paper introduces a new method to stylize 3D geometry. The key observation is that the surface normal is an effective instrument to capture different geometric styles. Centered around this observation, we cast stylization as a shape analogy problem, where the analogy relationship is defined on the surface normal. This formulation can deform a 3D shape into different styles within a single framework. One can plug-and-play different target styles by providing an exemplar shape or an energy-based style description (e.g., developable surfaces). Our surface stylization methodology enables Normal Captures as a geometric counterpart to material captures (MatCaps) used in rendering, and the prototypical concept of Spherical Shape Analogies as a geometric counterpart to image analogies in image processing.