Abstract: The paper presents a 2D or 3D shape deformation method which incorporates global and local stiffness controls. First, a geometric object is embedded into a regular lattice and then the deformation is conducted on the lattice; thus, the method is independent of the underlying object representation. The lattice cells are organized as overlapping local rigid regions, and the region width could be regarded as a means of the global lattice stiffness control. For each region, there is a local stiffness coefficient to control the lattice deformation locally. During the deformation a nonlinear objective function is optimized to achieve the natural lattice deformation with the prescribed global and local stiffnesses. Then, the lattice deformation is passed to the embedded object through bilinear or trilinear interpolation. In this way we can deform the object in a more physically plausible way with tunable stiffness. Experimental results show that the method is intuitive and flexible.