Auto-rigging 3D Bipedal Characters in Arbitrary Poses

Abstract

We present an end-to-end algorithm that can automatically rig a given 3D character such that it is ready for 3D animation. The animation of a virtual character requires the skeletal motion defined with bones and joints, and the corresponding deformation of the mesh represented with skin weights. While the conventional animation pipeline requires the initial 3D character to be in the predefined default pose, our pipeline can rig a 3D character in arbitrary pose. We handle the increased ambiguity by fixing the skeletal topology and solving for the full deformation space. After the skeletal positions and orientations are fully discovered, we can deform the provided 3D character into the default pose, from which we can animate the character with the help of recent motion-retargeting techniques. Our results show that we can successfully animate initially deformed characters, which was not possible with previous works.