In this paper

we propose a sketch based synthesis approach to create 3D animation of a target character. Our approach consists of the following steps: (a) a sketch based mapping between the sources and the target; (b) deforming the target based on the deformations of the corresponding sources by means of differential mean value coordinates; (c) stitching the deformed portions of the target together smoothly with constrained minimization method to form a key frame of the target animation; and (d) interpolating between key frames created from (c) to produce a complete 3D animation of the target. We provide new research contributions on all these topics

and integrate them into our newly developed prototype animating system. Our approach does not require the sources and target to share the same number of vertices or triangles

or to have matching connectivity. In our system

source animations can be 3D animations as well as 2D videos or macromedia flashes; and the target can even be unstructured or point cloud. Our approach is intuitive and is able to produce highly authentic 3D animations. We demonstrate our approach by constructing a full cart animation from dog

cat

snake and human animations as well as applying a 2D video of the wheel of a car onto the wheels of the cart. Other examples produced from our prototype system are also given in the paper to illustrate the generality and robust of our approach.