Abstract: Real-time deformation is one of the hot research issues in computer graphics and it is widely used in video games, virtual surgery and virtual reality. However, physically-based deformation can be computationally expensive, so the problem of real-time deformation for complex objects is yet to be solved. In this paper, a new method of real-time deformation is proposed, which integrates the advantages of physically-based deformation and multi-resolution mesh editing and works well with complex elastic objects. In the preprocessing stage, the algorithm simplifies the original detail mesh to generate a base mesh representation adaptively, and then encodes position and normal of the vertices of the detail mesh based on the base mesh. In the real-time rendering phase, the physically-based deformation is performed on the base mesh, and with the deformed base mesh and the encoding geometry details, the deformed detail mesh can be easily reconstructed. In order to improve the rendering speed, the rendering stage sufficiently utilizes the parallelism ability of graphics hardware and most calculation is executed by the fragment program. Experiments show that the method preserves the local details relatively well during the deformation procedure and it is suitable for the applications of real-time deformation of objects with complex surface details.