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Animation Setup Transfer for 3D Characters
Author(s) -
Avril Quentin,
Ghafourzadeh Donya,
Ramachandran Srinivasan,
Fallahdoust Sahel,
Ribet Sarah,
Dionne Olivier,
de Lasa Martin,
Paquette Eric
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
computer graphics forum
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.578
H-Index - 120
eISSN - 1467-8659
pISSN - 0167-7055
DOI - 10.1111/cgf.12816
Subject(s) - skinning , polygon mesh , computer science , character animation , pipeline (software) , animation , computer graphics (images) , geometry processing , character (mathematics) , inverse kinematics , computer animation , transformation (genetics) , artificial intelligence , topology (electrical circuits) , algorithm , geometry , mathematics , robot , ecology , biochemistry , chemistry , combinatorics , gene , biology , programming language
We present a general method for transferring skeletons and skinning weights between characters with distinct mesh topologies. Our pipeline takes as inputs a source character rig (consisting of a mesh, a transformation hierarchy of joints, and skinning weights) and a target character mesh. From these inputs, we compute joint locations and orientations that embed the source skeleton in the target mesh, as well as skinning weights to bind the target geometry to the new skeleton. Our method consists of two key steps. We first compute the geometric correspondence between source and target meshes using a semi‐automatic method relying on a set of markers. The resulting geometric correspondence is then used to formulate attribute transfer as an energy minimization and filtering problem. We demonstrate our approach on a variety of source and target bipedal characters, varying in mesh topology and morphology. Several examples demonstrate that the target characters behave well when animated with either forward or inverse kinematics. Via these examples, we show that our method preserves subtle artistic variations; spatial relationships between geometry and joints, as well as skinning weight details, are accurately maintained. Our proposed pipeline opens up many exciting possibilities to quickly animate novel characters by reusing existing production assets.