High Performance Automatic Character Skinning Based on Projection Distance

Abstract

Skeleton-driven-deformation methods have been commonly used in the character deformations. The process of painting skin weights for character deformation is a long-winded task requiring manual tweaking. We present a novel method to calculate skinning weights automatically from 3D human geometric model and corresponding skeleton. The method first, groups each mesh vertex of 3D human model to a skeleton bone by the minimum distance from a mesh vertex to each bone. Secondly, calculates each vertex’s weights to the adjacent bones by the vertex’s projection point distance to the bone joints. Our method’s output can not only be applied to any kind of skeleton-driven deformation, but also to motion capture driven (mocap-driven) deformation. Experiments results show that our method not only has strong generality and robustness, but also has high performance.