Continuous Skeleton-Driven Skinning - A General Approach For Modeling Skin Deformation

Defects by the linear blend skinning ( LBS) approach, such as "collapsing joints" and "candy-wrapper artefacts", are visually unpleasant when skinning animated characters and they are tedious to rectify. The cause of the defects is that the inherent non-linear skinning problem is handled linearly. Despite its shortcomings, this linear technique has been incorporated into the industrial production pipeline as a standard approach in character rigging. In this paper, we present a new skinning technique aiming at remedying the defects of the LBS approach without much disturbance of the current production pipeline. Our technique can be implemented by reusing the LBS as its sub-module offering an important advantage over other existing non-linear skinning techniques in terms of its simplicity and robustness. In our approach, we represent the skinning process as a continuous temporal deformation problem, where the skin deforms step-by-step to its final configuration. As a consequence, we reach a smooth and continuous solution without noticeable defects. Furthermore, our approach can be accelerated by caching the previous frames to boost the efficiency.