Real-time Skeletal Skinning with Optimized Centers of Rotation
Binh Huy Le and Jessica K. Hodgins
ACM Transactions on Graphics 35(4) - Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH 2016
Abstract: Skinning algorithms that work across a broad range of character de-signs and poses are crucial to creating compelling animations. Cur-rently, linear blend skinning (LBS) and dual quaternion skinning(DQS) are the most widely used, especially for real-time applica-tions. Both techniques are efficient to compute and are effective formany purposes. However, they also have many well-known arti-facts, such as collapsing elbows, candy wrapper twists, and bulgingaround the joints. Due to the popularity of LBS and DQS, it wouldbe of great benefit to reduce these artifacts without changing the an-imation pipeline or increasing the computational cost significantly.In this paper, we introduce a new direct skinning method that ad-dresses this problem. Our key idea is to pre-compute the optimizedcenter of rotation for each vertex from the rest pose and skinningweights. At runtime, these centers of rotation are used to interpo-late the rigid transformation for each vertex. Compared to otherdirect skinning methods, our method significantly reduces the ar-tifacts of LBS and DQS while maintaining real-time performanceand backwards compatibility with the animation pipeline.
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