Deformation Styles for Spline-based Skeletal Animation

Abstract

We present a novel skinned skeletal animation system based on spline-aligned deformations for providing high quality and fully designable deformations in real-time. Our ambition is to allow artists the easy creation of abstract, pose-dependent deformation behaviors that might directly be assigned to a large variety of target objects simultaneously. To achieve this goal, we introduce the usage of deformation styles and demonstrate their applicability by our animation system. We therefore enhance spline-skinned skeletal animation with two sweep-based free-form-deformation (FFD) variants. The two FFD variants are pose-dependent, driven by three textures and three curves, which can be designed by the artist. As the three textures are similar to height-maps, their creation is very intuitive. Once designed, the deformation styles can be directly applied to any number of targets for imitating material behaviors of cloth, metal or even muscles. Our GPU based implementation shows promising results for real-time usage, as about 30 Million vertices per second can be animated. The basic spline-skinning even reaches more than twice the speed and gets close to the performance of skeletal subspace deformation (SSD). Furthermore, our method can easily be combined along with other existing deformation techniques as pose space deformation or SSD.