Implicit skinning

Rodolphe Vaillant, Loïc Barthe, Gaël Guennebaud, Marie-Paule Cani, Damien Rohmer, Brian Wyvill, Olivier Gourmel, Mathias Paulin
2013 ACM Transactions on Graphics  
a) (b) Linear blending (c) Our with contact (d) Our with bulge (e) Real finger Figure 1: (a) Real-time animation of the index finger of a hand model composed of 31750 vertices. Two poses are shown in each column: (b) standard smooth skinning with linear blending at 95 frames per second (fps), (c) our method which compensates the loss of volume on top of joints and models contact in the fold at 37 fps, (d) our method with an additional bulge mimicking tissues inflation at 35 fps, and (e) a
more » ... e of a real bent finger. Abstract Geometric skinning techniques, such as smooth blending or dualquaternions, are very popular in the industry for their high performances, but fail to mimic realistic deformations. Other methods make use of physical simulation or control volume to better capture the skin behavior, yet they cannot deliver real-time feedback. In this paper, we present the first purely geometric method handling skin contact effects and muscular bulges in real-time. The insight is to exploit the advanced composition mechanism of volumetric, implicit representations for correcting the results of geometric skinning techniques. The mesh is first approximated by a set of implicit surfaces. At each animation step, these surfaces are combined in real-time and used to adjust the position of mesh vertices, starting from their smooth skinning position. This deformation step is done without any loss of detail and seamlessly handles contacts between skin parts. As it acts as a post-process, our method fits well into the standard animation pipeline. Moreover, it requires no intensive computation step such as collision detection, and therefore provides real-time performances.
doi:10.1145/2461912.2461960 fatcat:xm4mqtnwgzeffpahrwtifjdinu