Abstract: How to describe object motion and metamorphosis is more and more important for the development of virtual reality, industrial simulation, scientific computing visualization and so on. An almost comprehensive survey of the different approaches to object metamorphosis, which have been proposed in recent years, is presented in this paper. The normal metamorphosis principle is summarized, and the typical 2D metamorphosis approaches are introduced. The metamorphosis problem is studied in detail in the field of 3D object metamorphosis by using, shape based, volume based and morphology based technologies. Finally analyzed are the key points and the prospects of object metamorphosis, which lead to the important problems to be considered and solved.