NeuroEnveloping: a transferable character skin deformation technique

Abstract

We proposed a character skin deformation method, namely neuroEnveloping. The main idea relies on employing artificial neural networks to learn how to synthesize deformable skin from example shapes paired with skeleton postures of a character. Furthermore, having encoded the deformation information in the neural networks, the skinning model can be applied for the deformation of other similar characters. The character skin is decomposed into patches according to a base control mesh which is introduced as a common platform in the proposed framework. The deformation of each patch of the character is controlled by a trained neural network. We devised an effective stitching operator to eliminate discontinuities between neighboring patches. The experimental results show that the proposed approach can generate aesthetically pleasing results at interactive speed.