Progressive skinning for character animation

Abstract

Previous works have shown that for characters with obvious articulation, animations comprising the blending of skeletal bone transformations, significantly reduce the computation and data requirements, permitting much greater visual detail. However increasingly, animators and engine designers must produce animations that can run on platforms with quite different runtime capabilities. They may simply author multiple skeletons and sets of animations, or reduce the temporal or spatial detail to achieve acceptable frame rates. In this paper we show how these skeletal skinning methods can be extended to support a continuous level of animation detail. We show that by manipulating the skeletal hierarchy and skinning parameters we can throttle the computational load of a character model in real-time according to its position in a scene and any hardware constraints. Our method is compatible with additional geometric level of detail (LoD) methods.

Segmentation‐based skinning

“…By solving the vector field, the correction of volume is performed over the deformed mesh; this method uses a set of new weights S to control the correction in a localized level; however, this method cannot solve the candy‐wrapper artifact in LBS. An optimization method based on level of details can be found in , using LBS skinning a model's matrix transformation are precomputed based in its joints' hierarchy. If more detail in the animation is required, the method adjusts it progressively applying the matrix operations for the desired level of detail with no noticeable errors in the final animation.…”

A Key‐Pose Caching System for Rendering an Animated Crowd in Real‐Time

“…However, transforming a large number of crowd members from their neutral pose still consumes a significant proportion of the rendering time. Furthermore, although the computational cost may be reduced using progressive skinning [PSA07], a GPU implementation requires agents to be animated each time they are rendered and this incurs redundant processing within multi‐pass algorithms such as shadow mapping.…”

Direct rendering of feature-based skinning deformations

“…Except of the context of data reduction, the fully-automatically transform of MAs into compact and easily modified skeletal versions enables a full repertoire of already existing skeletal animation tools. Some representative ones are easy postpreprocessing, level of detail selection [113,125], collision handling [49,70] and efficient hardware accelerated reproduction of the initial input sequence.…”