Modeling and Estimation of Nonlinear Skin Mechanics for Animated Avatars

Abstract

Data-driven models of human avatars have shown very accurate representations of static poses with soft-tissue deformations. However they are not yet capable of precisely representing very nonlinear deformations and highly dynamic effects. Nonlinear skin mechanics are essential for a realistic depiction of animated avatars interacting with the environment, but controlling physics-only solutions often results in a very complex parameterization task. In this work, we propose a hybrid model in which the soft-tissue deformation of animated avatars is built as a combination of a data-driven statistical model, which kinematically drives the animation, an FEM mechanical simulation. Our key contribution is the definition of deformation mechanics in a reference pose space by inverse skinning of the statistical model. This way, we retain as much as possible of the accurate static data-driven deformation and use a custom anisotropic nonlinear material to accurately represent skin dynamics. Model parameters including the heterogeneous distribution of skin thickness and material properties are automatically optimized from 4D captures of humans showing soft-tissue deformations.