Velocity Skinning for Real-time Stylized Skeletal Animation

Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articlepeer-review

Documents

  • Fulltext

    Submitted manuscript, 4.27 MB, PDF document

Secondary animation effects are essential for liveliness. We propose a simple, real-time solution for adding them on top of standard skinning, enabling artist-driven stylization of skeletal motion. Our method takes a standard skeleton animation as input, along with a skin mesh and rig weights. It then derives per-vertex deformations from the different linear and angular velocities along the skeletal hierarchy. We highlight two specific applications of this general framework, namely the cartoon-like “squashy” and “floppy” effects, achieved from specific combinations of velocity terms. As our results show, combining these effects enables to mimic, enhance and stylize physical-looking behaviours within a standard animation pipeline, for arbitrary skinned characters. Interactive on CPU, our method allows for GPU implementation, yielding real-time performances even on large meshes. Animator control is supported through a simple interface toolkit, enabling to refine the desired type and magnitude of deformation at relevant vertices by simply painting weights. The resulting rigged character automatically responds to new skeletal animation, without further input.

Original languageEnglish
JournalComputer Graphics Forum
Volume40
Issue number2
Pages (from-to)549-561
Number of pages13
ISSN0167-7055
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - May 2021

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska‐Curie grant agreement No. 764644.

Funding Information:
We acknowledge and thank Paul Kry, Kenny Erleben, and all attendees of the 2020 McGill University Bellairs workshop, the origin of this work, for the fruitful discussions and input. We would also like to thank the artists, Rodney Florencio Da Costa, Kayla Rutherford, and Mohammad Saffar that offered their help and feedback in our usability study. This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 764644.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 The Author(s) Computer Graphics Forum © 2021 The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

ID: 306688765