We present a novel approach for physics-based character skinning. While maintaining real-time performance it overcomes the well-known artifacts of commonly used geometric skinning approaches, it enables dynamic effects, and it resolves local self-collisions. Our method is based on a two-layer model consisting of rigid bones and an elastic soft tissue layer. This volumetric model is easily and efficiently computed from an input surface mesh of the character and its underlying skeleton. In particular, our method neither requires skinning weights, which are often expensive to compute or tedious to hand-tune, nor a complex volumetric tessellation, which fails for many real-world input meshes due to self-intersections.

3D morphable models are widely used to describe the variation of human body shapes. However, these models typically focus on the surface of the human body, since the acquisition of the volumetric interior would require prohibitive medical imaging. In this paper we present a novel approach for creating a volumetric body template and for fitting this template to the surface scan of a person in a just a few seconds. The body model is composed of three surface layers for bones, muscles, and skin, which enclose the volumetric muscle and fat tissue in between them. Our approach includes a data-driven method for estimating the amount of muscle mass and fat mass from a surface scan, which provides more accurate fits to the variety of human body shapes compared to previous approaches. We also show how to efficiently embed fine-scale anatomical details, such as high resolution skeleton and muscle models, into the layered fit of a person. Our model can be used for physical simulation, statistical analysis, and anatomical visualization in computer animation and medical applications, which we demonstrate on several examples.

Figure 1: Geometric skinning approaches, like Linear Blend Skinning (LBS) or Dual Quaternion Skinning (DQS), suffer from well-known collapsing or bulging artifacts in joint regions. The recent physics-based Projective Skinning (PS) avoids these problems and resolves local collisions near joints. Our new Fast Projective Skinning (FPS) is one order of magnitude faster than Projective Skinning, provides higher surface quality, and seamlessly handles global collisions.