Skeleton-driven surface deformation through lattices for real-time character animation

Abstract

In this paper, an efficient deformation framework is presented for skeleton-driven polygonal characters. Standard solutions, such as linear blend skinning, focus on primary deformations and require intensive user adjustment. We propose constructing a lattice of cubic cells embracing the input surface mesh. Based on the lattice, our system automatically propagates smooth skinning weights from bones to drive the surface primary deformation, and it rectifies the over-compressed regions by volume preservation. The secondary deformation is, in the meanwhile, generated by the lattice shape matching with dynamic particles. The proposed framework can generate both low- and high-frequency surface motions such as muscle deformation and vibrations with few user interventions. Our results demonstrate that the proposed lattice-based method is liable to GPU computation, and it is adequate to real-time character animation.