Polycube construction and deformation are essential problems in computer graphics. In this paper, we present a robust, simple, efficient, and automatic algorithm to deform the meshes of arbitrary shapes into polycube form. We derive a clear relationship between a mesh and its corresponding polycube shape. Our algorithm is edge-preserving, and works on surface meshes with or without boundaries. Our algorithm outperforms previous ones with respect to speed, robustness, and efficiency. Our method is simple to implement. To demonstrate the robustness and effectivity of our method, we have applied it to hundreds of models of varying complexity and topology. We demonstrate that our method compares favorably to other state-of-the-art polycube deformation methods.