Deformation transfer is to transfer the deformation of a source deforming model to a target model. Not only the pose but the detailed deformations of a source model are transferred to a target model, causing the characteristic deformations of the target model are mixed with those of the source model. This leads to unnatural results. In this paper, we present a novel example-based deformation transfer approach to solve this problem. With the aid of a few target examples, the characteristic deformations of transferred target models are recovered. We evaluate our approach with several full-body articulated models. The experimental results show that our approach can generate more natural and convincing deformation transfer results than other approaches.