Physics and example based skin deformations for character animation

We present a fast physics and example based skin deformation method for character animation in this paper. The main idea is to represent the skin surface and its deformations with a group of curves whose computation incurs much less computing overheads than the direct surface-based approach. A fourth order ordinary differential equation is introduced to describe the deformations of the curves between two example skin shapes which relates geometric and physical properties and externally applied forces to shape changes of the curves. The skin deformation is determined from these deformed curves. Several examples are given in this paper to demonstrate the application of the method.

1. Introduction

In order to create realistic character animation, skin deformation has attracted a lot of research attention. Among various developed methods, three approaches have become the most popular. They are: joint-related, example-based and physics-based.