← ArchivePaper2021
Velocity Skinning for Real-time Stylized Skeletal Animation
Damien Rohmer, Marco Tarini, Niranjan Kalyanasundaram, Faezeh Moshfeghifar, Marie-Paule Cani, Victor Zordan
Per-vertex deformations derived from skeletal linear and angular velocities add cartoon squash-and-stretch effects on top of standard skinning in real time.
Abstract
Secondary animation effects are essential for liveliness. We propose a simple, real‐time solution for adding them on top of standard skinning, enabling artist‐driven stylization of skeletal motion. Our method takes a standard skeleton animation as input, along with a skin mesh and rig weights. It then derives per‐vertex deformations from the different linear and angular velocities along the skeletal hierarchy. We highlight two specific applications of this general framework, namely the cartoon‐like “squashy” and “floppy” effects, achieved from specific combinations of velocity terms. As our results show, combining these effects enables to mimic, enhance and stylize physical‐looking behaviours within a standard animation pipeline, for arbitrary skinned characters. Interactive on CPU, our method allows for GPU implementation, yielding real‐time performances even on large meshes. Animator control is supported through a simple interface toolkit, enabling to refine the desired type and magnitude of deformation at relevant vertices by simply painting weights. The resulting rigged character automatically responds to new skeletal animation, without further input.
How to read this
- Category
- Method: a real-time stylized skinning technique
- Contributions
- Derives per-vertex deformations from linear and angular velocities along the skeletal hierarchy, layered on top of standard skinning
- Realizes cartoon-like squashy and floppy effects from specific combinations of velocity terms
- Supports artist control via weight painting and runs in real time on CPU with a GPU implementation for large meshes
- Context
- Extends standard skeletal skinning pipelines (in the tradition of dual-quaternion skinning, Kavan et al.) to add velocity-driven secondary motion without a physics solver.Builds on: Skinning with Dual Quaternions
- Correctness
- Assumes secondary, stylized motion can be approximated from skeletal velocities rather than physical simulation; demonstrated on arbitrary skinned characters and aimed at liveliness and stylization, so it targets plausible cartoon effects rather than physically accurate dynamics.
- Clarity
- Accessible; a first pass conveys the velocity-to-deformation idea, with a second pass for the exact velocity-term combinations.
- How to read it
- First pass for the squash-and-stretch concept and where it fits in the rig; second pass on the velocity formulation and weight toolkit if implementing it.
Builds on
Built upon by
Nothing yet.
Related work
- Real-Time Skeletal Skinning with Optimized Centers of Rotation 2016 / SIGGRAPH
- NeuroSkinning: Automatic Skin Binding for Production Characters with Deep Graph Networks 2019 / SIGGRAPH
- Skinning with Dual Quaternions 2007 / SIGGRAPH
- Stretchable and Twistable Bones for Skeletal Shape Deformation 2011 / SIGGRAPH Asia
Keywords
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