Skinning Mesh Animations

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Abstract

We extend approaches for skinning characters to the general setting of skinning deformable mesh animations. We provide an automatic algorithm for generating progressive skinning approximations, that is particularly efficient for pseudo-articulated motions. Our contributions include the use of nonparametric mean shift clustering of high-dimensional mesh rotation sequences to automatically identify statistically relevant bones, and robust least squares methods to determine bone transformations, bone-vertex influence sets, and vertex weight values. We use a low-rank data reduction model defined in the undeformed mesh configuration to provide progressive convergence with a fixed number of bones. We show that the resulting skinned animations enable efficient hardware rendering, rest pose editing, and deformable collision detection. Finally, we present numerous examples where skins were automatically generated using a single set of parameter values.

Citation

Doug L. James and Christopher D. Twigg. Skinning mesh animations. ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH 2005), 24(3), August 2005. [BiBTeX]

Funding

This research is supported by:

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The chicken character was created by Andrew Glassner, Tom McClure, Scott Benza, and Mark Van Langeveld. This short sequence of connectivity and vertex position data is distributed solely for the purpose of comparison of geometry compression techniques.