Efficient ordinary differential equation-based modelling and skin deformations for character animation.

Abstract

In the area of character animation, skin surface modelling, rigging and skin deforamtion are three essential aspects. Due to the different complexity of the characters, the time cost on creating corresponding skin surface model, animation skeleton in order to achieve diverse skin de- formations, fluctuates from several hours to several weeks. More importantly, the data size of skin deformations could sharply influence the efficiency of generating animation. Smaller data size can also speed up character animation and transmission over computer networks. Over years, researchers have developed a variety of skin deformation techniques. Geometric skin deformation approaches have high efficiency but low realism. Example-based skin deformation approaches interpolate a set of given example poses to improve realism and effects that cannot be easily produced by geometric approaches. Physics-based skin deformation methods can greatly improve the realism of character animation, but require non-trivial training, intensive manual intervention, and heavy numerical calculations. Due to these limitations, many recent activities have initiated the research of integrating geometric, example-based, and physics-based skin deformation approaches. The current research is to develop techniques based on Ordinary Differentical Equations (ODE) to efficiently create C2 continuous skin surfaces through two boundary curves, automatically generate skeleton to make the rigging process fast enough for highly efficient computer animation applications, and achieve physically realistic skin deformations for character animation by integrating geometric, physical and data-driven methods. Meanwhile, it is the first attempt to obtain an analytical solution to realistic physics-based skin deformations for highly efficient computation, to avoid the solving of a large set of linear equations, which largely reduces data size and computing time. The basic idea is to build ODE mechanics model, involve isoparametric curves and Fourier Series representation, develop accurate and efficient solutions to calculate physical skin deformations through interpolating input realistic reconstructed 3D models. The proposed techniques will greatly avoid tedious manual work, reduce data size, improve skin deformation realism, and raise efficiency of producing character animation.