Skeleton-Aware Skin Weight Transfer for Helper Joint Rigs

Abstract

We propose a method to transfer skin weights and helper joints from a reference model to other targets. Our approach uses two types of spatial proximity to find the correspondence between the target vertex and reference mesh regions. The proposed method first generates a guide weight map to establish a relationship between the skin vertices and skeletal joints using a standard skinning technique. The correspondence between the reference and target skins is established using vertex-to-bone projection and bone-to-skin ray-casting using the guide weights. This method enables fully automated and smooth transfer of skin weight between human-like characters bound to helper joint rigs.