Abstract: In computer graphics, methods for mesh simplification are common. However, most of them focus on static meshes, only few works have been proposed for simplifying dynamic models. In this paper, we propose an efficient method for the multiresolution representation of deforming surfaces based on deformation distance analysis. Our method gets different level of detail models by performing iterative edge contraction operations. We use deformation distance to analyze the deformation degree of the triangle planes during the whole animation, and define a deformation weight to be added to the aggregated edge contraction cost. So the features in areas with large deformation can be preserved well in the output animation model. We also propose a mesh optimization method for dynamic models. We first compute the mean value coordinate weight of the first frame model, and then use it to move the vertices on the second frame model. Similarly, we use the weights calculated on the second frame model to move vertices in the third frame model, and so on. So we can transfer the triangle shapes in the current frame to the next frame. This can efficiently improve the temporal coherence of the output animation and reduce visual artifacts between adjacent frames. The results show that our approach is efficient, easy to implement, and good quality dynamic approximations with well-preserved fine details can be generated at any given frame.