Contents 1. INTRODUCTION
3D computer animations are now widely used and accepted in gaming and entertainment industry. Typically, the graphics artist would create the mesh used for animation or use an existing mesh produced by another artist. 3D watermarking algorithms provide content protection for the mesh vertices. However, that does not protect the creator of the animation, who produces the animation using the 3D model. There have been several papers focusing on protecting the mesh but animation protection is still a wide open research field. This paper addresses this need by proposing a novel algorithm for skinned mesh animations. Skin meshes or skeletal meshes are one of the most important subjects in a 3D world. Skinned animations [1] stretch the mesh around the bones and assign a skin weight to each vertex in the model so that the skin can move over the bones especially at the joints. Skinned animations enable efficient hardware rendering, rest pose editing, and deformable collision detection. The process of watermarking mesh animation poses problems related to mesh watermarking scheme properties, such as imperceptibility of the watermark, and robustness against data modification attacks. Mesh animation can be subject to motion editing operations done intentionally (adversary) or unintentionally (user-an artist) by using motion editing software such as 3ds Max and Maya [2]. The additional requirements of the mesh animation watermarking technique are not to destroy or modify the existing watermark which may exist in the mesh.
