Geodesic Binding for Degenerate Character Geometry Using Sparse Voxelization.

Area of Science:

• Computer Graphics
• Geometric Modeling
• Animation

Background:

• Character skinning methods like linear blend skinning and dual quaternion skinning are crucial in 3D animation.
• Specifying accurate influence weights for these methods can be complex and time-consuming.
• Production meshes often present challenges such as non-manifold geometry and non-watertight surfaces.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a fully automatic method for specifying influence weights for closed-form skinning techniques.
• To create a system that efficiently handles complex and imperfect production 3D meshes.
• To enable interactive weight modification for artists without additional pre-processing.

Main Methods:

• The proposed method voxelizes the input character rest pose mesh and skeleton hierarchy.
• Binding weights are calculated using geodesic distances between skeleton bone voxels and non-exterior mesh voxels.
• The system decouples weight assignment from distance computation for interactive adjustments.

Main Results:

• The method generates smooth skinning weights at interactive rates.
• It successfully handles production meshes with non-manifold geometry, non-watertight surfaces, intersecting triangles, and multiple components.
• Weight modification can be performed interactively at pose time without re-computation.

Conclusions:

• This automatic method simplifies the process of assigning influence weights for character skinning.
• It offers an efficient and flexible solution for artists working with complex 3D assets.
• The interactive nature of the weight adjustment empowers artists to refine character deformations more effectively.