Survey of Skinning Method in 3D Character Animation

Character skinning is one of the most important tasks in 3D animations, games design and visual effects in film production. With the development of 3D animations, a good way of skinning becomes an important role. With the increasing requirements of skinning, many new methods and techniques have emerged. The most core part is real-time shape deformations, to make the skin of characters to act more realistic, no informal deformation should happen. This paper introduces skinning technique in 4 categories: geometric methods, physical methods, example based approaches, energy based methods. A brief discussion and comparison of these methods are provided in the end.