GhostMesh: Cloud-based interactive mesh editing

Interactive deformation of complex meshes is a challenging task in modeling and animation, due to high computation and storage requirements. The emerging cloud computing technology, as well as cloud storage, provides a possible consumer-level solution so that interactive mesh editing could work in light-weighted clients with public cloud services. In this paper we present a system for efficient interactive editing of complex models. Building over a client-server-based distributed architecture, our system transfers computationally heavy tasks (e.g., computing of blending weights, construction of handles) and storage from the client to a cloud computing environment, and allows the user to edit a complex mesh that stored in the cloud server by interactively modifying a simplified mesh locally. When the user specifies coarse deformations on the client, user manipulations are sent to the cloud server, and the original complex mesh is deformed accordingly in the background. Experiments conducted on various complex models show that our system achieves very efficient performance, and the most important, remains fully compatible with the classical WYSIWYG deformations.