Automatic skinning and animation of skeletal models
In this paper, we present an efficient yet easy-to-implement technique which performs automatic skinning and animation of skeletal models. At a pre-processing stage, a character model is firstly decomposed into a number of segments per bone basis, and each segment is then subdivided into several chunks. A convex cage is automatically created for each chunk. The skinning and animation of skeletal models is achieved via two steps. At the first step, by minimizing a sum of several energy terms, chunk cages are implicitly skinned to the skeleton and animated. These energies are carefully designed to prevent unnatural volume change and guarantee smooth deformation transition between adjacent cages. At the second step, the model mesh vertices, represented as the mean-value coordinates with reference to proper cage vertices, are updated via cage-based deformation technique. Our approach avoids the labor-intensive process of vertex weighting and cage generation. Given the motion of a skeleton, the character model can be animated automatically.
cage skeleton deformation