Geodesic Voxel Binding for Production Character Meshes
People
Abstract
We propose a fully automatic method for specifying influence weights for closed-form skinning methods, such as linear blend skinning. Our method is designed to work with production meshes that may contain non-manifold geometry, be non-watertight, have intersecting triangles, or be comprised of multiple connected components. Starting from a character rest pose mesh and skeleton hierarchy, we first voxelize the input geometry. The resulting voxelization is then used to calculate binding weights, based on the geodesic distance between each voxel lying on a skeleton "bone" and all non-exterior voxels. This yields smooth weights at interactive rates, without time-constants, iteration parameters, or costly optimization at bind or pose time. By decoupling weight assignment from distance computation we make it possible to modify weights interactively, at pose time, without additional pre-processing or computation. This allows artists to assess impact of weight selection in the context in which they are used.
Paper
Olivier Dionne and Martin de Lasa, Geodesic Voxel Binding for Production Character Meshes ACM SIGGRAPH / Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation (SCA), Anaheim, CA, July 19-21, 2013. BibTexVideo
Geodesic Voxel Binding for Production Character Meshes from Olivier Dionne on Vimeo.