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Real-Time Skeletal Skinning with Optimized Centers of Rotation
Optimizes per-vertex rotation centers for skeletal skinning, nearly eliminating candy-wrapper and volume-loss artifacts in real time.
Abstract
Skinning algorithms that work across a broad range of character designs and poses are crucial to creating compelling animations. Currently, linear blend skinning (LBS) and dual quaternion skinning (DQS) are the most widely used, especially for real-time applications. Both techniques are efficient to compute and are effective for many purposes. However, they also have many well-known artifacts, such as collapsing elbows, candy wrapper twists, and bulging around the joints. Due to the popularity of LBS and DQS, it would be of great benefit to reduce these artifacts without changing the animation pipeline or increasing the computational cost significantly. In this paper, we introduce a new direct skinning method that addresses this problem. Our key idea is to pre-compute the optimized center of rotation for each vertex from the rest pose and skinning weights. At runtime, these centers of rotation are used to interpolate the rigid transformation for each vertex. Compared to other direct skinning methods, our method significantly reduces the artifacts of LBS and DQS while maintaining real-time performance and backwards compatibility with the animation pipeline.
How to read this
- Category
- Method: a real-time direct skinning algorithm
- Contributions
- A direct skinning method that precomputes an optimized center of rotation per vertex from the rest pose and skinning weights
- Runtime interpolation of a rigid transformation per vertex from these centers, significantly reducing LBS and DQS artifacts (collapsing elbows, candy-wrapper twists, joint bulging)
- Maintains real-time performance and backwards compatibility with existing animation pipelines
- Context
- Sits alongside the standard direct-skinning family (linear blend skinning and Kavan et al.'s dual quaternion skinning), aiming to fix their well-known artifacts without changing the pipeline.Builds on: Skinning with Dual Quaternions
- Correctness
- Validated as an artifact-reduction drop-in across a range of characters and poses; the trade-off is a precomputation step tied to the rest pose and skinning weights, and it remains a direct (non-physical) method so it approximates rather than simulates tissue.
- Clarity
- Very accessible; the central idea is intuitive and a first pass conveys it well, with the optimization details reserved for a second pass.
- How to read it
- First pass for the optimized-center-of-rotation idea and the artifact comparisons; a second pass on the precomputation formulation is worth it if you plan to implement or integrate it.
Builds on
Built upon by
Related work
- Skinning: Real-time Shape Deformation 2014 / SIGGRAPH
- Direct Delta Mush Skinning and Variants 2019 / SIGGRAPH
- Segmentation-Based Skinning 2017 / CAVW
- NeuroSkinning: Automatic Skin Binding for Production Characters with Deep Graph Networks 2019 / SIGGRAPH
Keywords
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