Abstract: One crucial issue of multi-resolution surface representations is how to effectively record and reconstruct geometric details among surface levels. Standard multi-resolution techniques encode details directly as local displacements in the vertices, and may produce unplausible results when the base level endures large deformations. In this paper we propose an alternative detail representation and reconstruction scheme, based on local transformations on a per-triangle basis. While more storage is required, recording details as local transformations favors global coupling of geometric details and allows for large-scale surface manipulations. By modeling the scale components of the surface modifications as a set of deforming factors, we achieved detail-preserving reconstruction results naturally under very large deformations. Comprehensive experimental results verify the efficiency and robustness of our approach.