Accurate and Efficient Lighting for Skinned Models

Abstract

In the context of real-time, GPU-based rendering of animated skinned meshes, we propose a new algorithm to compute surface normals with minimal overhead both in terms of the memory footprint and the required per-vertex operations. By accounting for the variation of the skinning weights over the surface, we achieve a higher visual quality compared to the standard approximation ubiquitously used in video-game engines and other real-time applications. Our method supports Linear Blend Skinning and Dual Quaternion Skinning. We demonstrate the advantages of our technique on a variety of datasets and provide a complete open-source implementation, including GLSL shaders.