Building Efficient, Accurate Character Skins From Examples
ACM Transcations on Graphics, Volume 22, Number 3, page 562--568 — jul 2003
Good character animation requires convincing skin deformations
including subtleties and details like muscle bulges. Such effects are
typically created in commercial animation packages which provide
very general and powerful tools. While these systems are convenient
and flexible for artists, the generality often leads to characters
that are slow to compute or that require a substantial amount of
memory and thus cannot be used in interactive systems. Instead,
interactive systems restrict artists to a specific character deformation
model which is fast and memory efficient but is notoriously
difficult to author and can suffer from many deformation artifacts.
This paper presents an automated framework that allows character
artists to use the full complement of tools in high-end systems to
create characters for interactive systems. Our method starts with an
arbitrarily rigged character in an animation system. A set of examples
is exported, consisting of skeleton configurations paired with
the deformed geometry as static meshes. Using these examples, we
fit the parameters of a deformation model that best approximates the
original data yet remains fast to compute and compact in memory.
Images and movies
BibTex references
@Article{MG03, author = "Mohr, Alex and Gleicher, Michael", title = "Building Efficient, Accurate Character Skins From Examples", journal = "ACM Transcations on Graphics", number = "3", volume = "22", pages = "562--568", month = "jul", year = "2003", note = "Special Issue: Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH 2003", url = "http://graphics.cs.wisc.edu/Papers/2003/MG03" }