Progressive skinning for character animation

Abstract

AbstractPrevious works have shown that for characters with obvious articulation, animations comprising the blending of skeletal bone transformations, significantly reduce the computation and data requirements, permitting much greater visual detail. However increasingly, animators and engine designers must produce animations that can run on platforms with quite different runtime capabilities. They may simply author multiple skeletons and sets of animations, or reduce the temporal or spatial detail to achieve acceptable frame rates. In this paper we show how these skeletal skinning methods can be extended to support a continuous level of animation detail. We show that by manipulating the skeletal hierarchy and skinning parameters we can throttle the computational load of a character model in real‐time according to its position in a scene and any hardware constraints. Our method is compatible with additional geometric level of detail (LoD) methods. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.