From BlenderWiki

Jump to: navigation, search

Laplacian Deform

Mode: Any mode

Panel: Modifiers


The Laplacian Deform modifier allows you to pose a mesh while preserving geometric details of the surface.

The user defines a set of 'anchor' vertices, and then moves some of them around. The modifier keeps the rest of the anchor vertices in fixed positions, and calculates the best possible locations of all the remaining vertices to preserve the original geometric details.

This modifier captures the geometric details with the uses of differential coordinates. The differential coordinates captures the local geometric information how curvature and direction of a vertex based on its neighbors.

You must define a Anchors Vertex Group. Without a vertex group modifier does nothing.


Anchors Vertex Group
A vertex group name, to define the group of vertices that user uses to transform the model. The weight of each vertex does not affect the behavior of the modifier; the method only takes into account vertices with weight greater than 0.
Bind button is disabled until the user select a valid Anchors Vertex Group
The Bind button is what tells the Laplacian Deform modifier to actually capture the geometry details of the object, so that altering the anchors vertexes actually alters the shape of the deformed object.
Bind button is enabled when the user selected a valid Anchors Vertex Group
When a geometry details has been captured from a mesh, it can later be released by selecting the Unbind button which replaced the Bind one.
Unbind button is enabled after the user pressed the Bind button
Repetitions iteratively improve the solution found. The objective of the system is to find the rotation of the differential coordinates preserving the best possible geometric detail. The system retains details better if more repetitions are used. A small Repeat number is recommended, as the system takes a long time to calculate each repetition.
Original Model
Repeat: 1
Repeat: 2
Repeat: 5
Original Model
Repeat: 1
Repeat: 2
Repeat: 10


If the mesh is dense, with a number of vertices greater than 100,000, then it is possible that the nonlinear optimization system will fail.

Vertex group My Anchors is not valid
This message is displayed when a user deletes a Vertex Group or when the user changes the name of the Vertex Group.
My Anchors is the anchors vertex group for this example
Verts changed from 954 to 955
This message is displayed when a user add or delete verts to the mesh.
954 to 955 correspond to the number of verts changed by user before and after
Edges changed from 2009 to 2010
This message is displayed when a user add or delete edges to the mesh.
2009 to 2010 correspond to the number of edges changed by user before and after
The system did not find a solution
This message is displayed if the solver SuperLU did not find a solution for the linear system.
Apinzonf Diagram Deform Modifier Panel 09.png


Cactus example with Armature object Download Cactus blend file
Horse example with Hook objects Download Horse blend file


Laplacian Surface Editing is a method developed by Olga Sorkine and others in 2004. This method preserves geometric details as much as possible while the user makes editing operations. This method uses differential coordinates corresponding to the difference between a vector and the weighted average of its neighbors to represent the local geometric detail of the mesh.

Differential Coordinate

See Also

Laplacian Surface Editing (Original paper)

Differential Coordinates for Interactive Mesh Editing