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A comparison of linear skinning techniques for character animation

Published: 29 October 2007 Publication History

Abstract

Character animation is the task of moving a complex, artificial character in a life-like manner. A widely used method for character animation involves embedding a simple skeleton within a character model and then animating the character by moving the underlying skeleton. The character's skin is required to move and deform along with the skeleton. Research into this problem has resulted in a number of skinning frameworks. There has, however, been no objective attempt to compare these methods.
We compare three linear skinning frameworks that are computationally efficient enough to be used for real-time animation: Skeletal Subspace Deformation, Animation Space and Multi-Weight Enveloping. These create a correspondence between the points on a character's skin and the underlying skeleton by means of a number of weights, with more weights providing greater flexibility. The quality of each of the three frameworks is tested by generating the skins for a number of poses for which the ideal skin is known. These generated skin meshes are then compared to the ideal skins using various mesh comparison techniques and human studies are used to determine the effect of any temporal artefacts introduced. We found that Skeletal Subspace Deformation lacks flexibility while Multi-Weight Enveloping is prone to overfitting. Animation Space consistently outperforms the other two frameworks.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    AFRIGRAPH '07: Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Computer graphics, virtual reality, visualisation and interaction in Africa
    October 2007
    215 pages
    ISBN:9781595939067
    DOI:10.1145/1294685
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 29 October 2007

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    Author Tags

    1. animation
    2. comparison
    3. real-time
    4. skinning

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    • (2023)Advanced Processing of 4D Body Scanning Technology for the Ergonomic Design of Products and EnvironmentsErgonomics in Design: The Quarterly of Human Factors Applications10.1177/1064804623116139231:3(30-37)Online publication date: 30-May-2023
    • (2022)Groom Styles Interpolation with Features Preservation for Digital Creatures EffectsProceedings of the 2022 Digital Production Symposium10.1145/3543664.3543683(1-8)Online publication date: 7-Aug-2022
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