An automatic skinning method for real-time deformation

Abstract

Skinning is widely used in character animation as a fast approach of deformation. Traditional skinning methods need a lot of manual work to build skeleton and paint weights, which can only be done by professional Animators. Recently, most researches are focusing on automatic skinning methods, so that the animators can complete model deformation much more easily. In this paper, we propose a robust automatic skinning method to realize real-time deformation. We first precisely embedding a skeleton by designing a penalty function, then the weights are computed by minimizing the Laplacian energy subject to bound constraints. The result shows that this method has a great performance for arbitrary models, especially for those who have the similar shapes with human beings.