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Automatic skinning and animation of skeletal models

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Abstract

In this paper, we present an efficient yet easy-to-implement technique which performs automatic skinning and animation of skeletal models. At a pre-processing stage, a character model is firstly decomposed into a number of segments per bone basis, and each segment is then subdivided into several chunks. A convex cage is automatically created for each chunk. The skinning and animation of skeletal models is achieved via two steps. At the first step, by minimizing a sum of several energy terms, chunk cages are implicitly skinned to the skeleton and animated. These energies are carefully designed to prevent unnatural volume change and guarantee smooth deformation transition between adjacent cages. At the second step, the model mesh vertices, represented as the mean-value coordinates with reference to proper cage vertices, are updated via cage-based deformation technique. Our approach avoids the labor-intensive process of vertex weighting and cage generation. Given the motion of a skeleton, the character model can be animated automatically.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mechanical Engineering, Zhejiang University, 310027, Hangzhou, PR China

    Jituo Li & Guodong Lu

  2. Engineering Research Center of Digitized Textile & Fashion Technology, Ministry of Education, Donghua University, Shanghai, PR China

    Jituo Li

  3. Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, PR China

    Juntao Ye

Authors
  1. Jituo Li
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  2. Guodong Lu
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  3. Juntao Ye
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Correspondence to Jituo Li.

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Li, J., Lu, G. & Ye, J. Automatic skinning and animation of skeletal models. Vis Comput 27, 585–594 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00371-011-0585-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00371-011-0585-8

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