Abstract: Mesh deformation with detail preserving is very important in many application fields, such as online game, computer animation, digital entertainment, movie production, computer aided design, military simulation and virtual worlds. However, it is a challenging problem in computer graphics to efficiently edit complex triangular meshes for existing deformation techniques. In this paper, a novel mesh deformation algorithm with detail preserving is presented. It deforms the input mesh as rigidly as possible, hence greatly reducing surface detail distortion even under large deformations. This approach first conducts clustering-based simplification on the original mesh according to the richness of local details. The simplified mesh is then deformed, and adjacent vertices undergoing similar transformation are merged into one vertex. By local frame encoding, this deformation is then transferred to the original mesh to generate an initial deformation result. Since vertices belonging to the same cluster undergo the same rigid transformation, discontinuity will occur between vertices belonging to different clusters. To prevent these artifacts, the position of each vertex is further adjusted by iteratively minimizing a quadric energy function to arrive at the final deformation result. Various experiment results show that the presented algorithm is simple, easy to use, robust and very effective in preserving surface details.