Dihedral Rigidity and Deformation

Abstract: We consider defining the embedding of a triangle mesh into $R^3$, up to translation, rotation, and scale, by its vector of dihedral angles. Theoretically, we show that locally, almost everywhere, the map from realizable vectors of dihedrals to mesh embeddings is one-to-one. We experiment with a heuristic method for mapping straight-line interpolations in dihedral space to interpolations between mesh embeddings and produce smooth and intuitively appealing morphs between three-dimensional shapes.