Atlas-Based Character Skinning with Automatic Mesh Decomposition

Abstract: Skinning is the most tedious part in the character animation process. Using standard methods, joint weights must be attached to each vertex of the character’s mesh, which is often time-consuming if an accurate animation is required. We propose a new modeling of the skinning process, inspired by the notion of atlas of charts. Starting from the character’s animation skeleton, we first automatically decompose the mesh into anatomically meaningful overlapping regions. Regions are then blended in their overlapping parts using continuous transition functions. This leads to a simple yet ecient,skinning process for which the weights are automatically defined and do not depend on the Euclidean distance but on the distance on the surface. Key-words: character animation, skinning, atlas of charts, segmentation Part of this work was done while the first author was visiting INRIA with a “INRIA