Skinning of skeletally deformable models is extensively used for real-time animation of characters, creatures and similar objects. The standard solution, linear blend skinning, has some serious drawbacks that require artist intervention. Therefore, a number of alternatives have been proposed in recent years. All of them successfully combat some of the artifacts, but none challenge the simplicity and efficiency of linear blend skinning. As a result, linear blend skinning is still the number one choice for the majority of developers. In this article, we present a novel skinning algorithm based on linear combination of dual quaternions. Even though our proposed method is approximate, it does not exhibit any of the artifacts inherent in previous methods and still permits an efficient GPU implementation. Upgrading an existing animation system from linear to dual quaternion skinning is very easy and has a relatively minor impact on runtime performance.

Figure 1: A comparison of dual quaternion skinning with previous methods: log-matrix blending [Cordier and Magnenat-Thalmann 2005] and spherical blend skinning [Kavan and Zara 2005]. The proposed approach not only eliminates artifacts, but is also much easier to implement and more than twice as fast. AbstractSkinning of skeletally deformable models is extensively used for real-time animation of characters, creatures and similar objects. The standard solution, linear blend skinning, has some serious drawbacks that require artist intervention. Therefore, a number of alternatives have been proposed in recent years. All of them successfully combat some of the artifacts, but none challenge the simplicity and efficiency of linear blend skinning. As a result, linear blend skinning is still the number one choice for the majority of developers. In this paper, we present a novel GPU-friendly skinning algorithm based on dual quaternions. We show that this approach solves the artifacts of linear blend skinning at minimal additional cost. Upgrading an existing animation system (e.g., in a videogame) from linear to dual quaternion skinning is very easy and has negligible impact on run-time performance.

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Matrix palette skinning (also known as skeletal subspace deformation) is a very popular real-time animation technique. So far, it has only been applied to the class of quasi-articulated objects, such as moving human or animal figures. In this paper, we demonstrate how to automatically construct skinning approximations of arbitrary precomputed animations, such as those of cloth or elastic materials. In contrast to previous approaches, our method is particularly well suited to input animations without rigid components. Our transformation fitting algorithm finds optimal skinning transformations (in a least-squares sense) and therefore achieves considerably higher accuracy for non-quasi-articulated objects than previous methods. This allows the advantages of skinned animations (e.g., efficient rendering, rest-pose editing and fast collision detection) to be exploited for arbitrary deformations.