Animation Setup Transfer for 3D Characters

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Date
2016
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Abstract
We present a general method for transferring skeletons and skinning weights between characters with distinct mesh topologies. Our pipeline takes as inputs a source character rig (consisting of a mesh, a transformation hierarchy of joints, and skinning weights) and a target character mesh. From these inputs, we compute joint locations and orientations that embed the source skeleton in the target mesh, as well as skinning weights to bind the target geometry to the new skeleton. Our method consists of two key steps. We first compute the geometric correspondence between source and target meshes using a semi-automatic method relying on a set of markers. The resulting geometric correspondence is then used to formulate attribute transfer as an energy minimization and filtering problem. We demonstrate our approach on a variety of source and target bipedal characters, varying in mesh topology and morphology. Several examples demonstrate that the target characters behave well when animated with either forward or inverse kinematics. Via these examples, we show that our method preserves subtle artistic variations; spatial relationships between geometry and joints, as well as skinning weight details, are accurately maintained. Our proposed pipeline opens up many exciting possibilities to quickly animate novel characters by reusing existing production assets.
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@article{
10.1111:cgf.12816
, journal = {Computer Graphics Forum}, title = {{
Animation Setup Transfer for 3D Characters
}}, author = {
Avril, Quentin
and
Ghafourzadeh, Donya
and
Ramachandran, Srinivasan
and
Fallahdoust, Sahel
and
Ribet, Sarah
and
Dionne, Olivier
and
Lasa, Martin de
and
Paquette, Eric
}, year = {
2016
}, publisher = {
The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
}, ISSN = {
1467-8659
}, DOI = {
10.1111/cgf.12816
} }
Citation