The 12th International Conference on Computer-Aided Design and Computer Graphics (CAD/Graphics 2011) was held in Shandong University, Jinan, China, on September 15-17, 2011, and was sponsored by the China Computer Federation. The conference provided an international forum for researchers and developers from various countries to exchange new ideas on computer aided design and computer graphics.

Initially eight papers were selected from the best papers accepted for the conference and their authors submitted an extended version to the special issue. Each submission was assigned to at least three reviewers and underwent at least two review cycles, in addition to the conference reviewing. In the end five papers were accepted for the special issue.

In paper [1], the authors present a skeleton-driven deformation method; they propose constructing a lattice of cubic cells embracing the input surface mesh to drive the deformation. A novel method is presented in paper [2] for creating a panoramic image of a borehole from a video sequence, without the need for camera calibration and tracking. The authors of paper [3] show how to use movable cellular automata (MCA) to simulate fracture phenomena in heterogeneous objects. Paper [4] presents an expressive rendering approach for visualizing large-scale 3D city scenes, combining photorealistic and nonphotorealistic rendering styles to highlight the information of interest to users while de-emphasizing other less important content. A simple and effective method is presented in paper [5] to create volumetric halos to enhance depth perception and display spatial relationships in illustrative visualization.

We would like to thank all the external reviewers, the authors of the selected papers, and others who have helped to ensure the high quality of the papers. We wish to acknowledge Prof. Dr. Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann, Editor-in-Chief of The Visual Computer, for allowing us to produce this special issue and helping with the process, as well as all staff at Springer for their help during the production process.