Abstract: Existing deformation techniques are oblivious to salient structures that often capture the essence of 3D meshes. Combining with gradient domain technique, we propose an alternative approach to preserve these structures in the volumetric subspace. Through a simple sketching interface, the structures of the input mesh are specified by the user. During deformations, these key structures are constrained to deform rigidly to maintain their original shapes, hence avoiding serious visual artifacts. However, this process leads to a nonlinear optimization problem. To guarantee fast convergence as well as numerical stability, we project the deformation energy onto a volumetric subspace which envelops the input mesh. Then the energy optimization is performed in this subspace to greatly facilitate the editing of large meshes. Massive experimental data demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our algorithm.