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Fast and Efficient Skinning of Animated Meshes

Ladislav Kavan, Peter-Pike Sloan, Carol O'Sullivan

CGFAcademic107 citesSkinning

Iterative coordinate-descent algorithm that decomposes arbitrary mesh animations into standard linear blend skinning without manual rigging.

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Abstract

Skinning is a simple yet popular deformation technique combining compact storage with efficient hardware accelerated rendering. While skinned meshes (such as virtual characters) are traditionally created by artists, previous work proposes algorithms to construct skinning automatically from a given vertex animation. However, these methods typically perform well only for a certain class of input sequences and often require long pre‐processing times. We present an algorithm based on iterative coordinate descent optimization which handles arbitrary animations and produces more accurate approximations than previous techniques, while using only standard linear skinning without any modifications or extensions. To overcome the computational complexity associated with the iterative optimization, we work in a suitable linear subspace (obtained by quick approximate dimensionality reduction) and take advantage of the typically very sparse vertex weights. As a result, our method requires about one or two orders of magnitude less pre‐processing time than previous methods.

How to read this

Category: Method: automatic conversion of mesh animation into linear blend skinning
Contributions: An iterative coordinate-descent algorithm that decomposes arbitrary vertex animations into standard linear blend skinning with no manual rigging
More accurate approximations than prior techniques while using only unmodified linear skinning
Working in an approximate reduced linear subspace and exploiting sparse vertex weights to cut preprocessing time by one to two orders of magnitude
Context: Addresses skinning-decomposition of vertex animations, related to dual-quaternion skinning (Kavan et al., Skinning with Dual Quaternions) but deliberately targeting plain linear blend skinning for compatibility.Builds on: Skinning with Dual Quaternions
Correctness: Assumes the animation is well represented by standard LBS within a low-dimensional subspace; readers should note results are reported as more accurate across arbitrary sequences but the approximation quality is inherently bounded by what unextended linear skinning can express.
Clarity: Moderately technical; a first pass conveys the decompose-into-LBS goal, do a second pass for the coordinate-descent optimization and the dimensionality reduction.
How to read it: Read why LBS-compatible output matters and the overall optimization loop first; a second pass on the subspace reduction and weight sparsity pays off if preprocessing cost is your concern.

Builds on

Skinning with Dual Quaternions 2007

Built upon by

Nothing yet.

Related work

Compressed Skinning for Facial Blendshapes 2024 / SIGGRAPH
Fast and Deep Deformation Approximations 2018 / SIGGRAPH
Skinning: Real-time Shape Deformation 2014 / SIGGRAPH
Real-Time Skeletal Skinning with Optimized Centers of Rotation 2016 / SIGGRAPH

Keywords

linear blend skinning skinning decomposition skinning mesh animations coordinate descent alternating least squares dimensionality reduction proxy-bones sparse vertex weights convex weights matrix factorization clustered pca truncated svd dual quaternion skinning mesh animation compression non-negative least squares region growing clustering

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