left one is an extreme shoulder twist deformed by LBS, right is the same posture deformed by SBS
Abstract
Skin deformation based on an underlying skeleton is a common method to animate believable organic models. The most widely used skeletal animation algorithm, linear blend skinning, is also known as skeleton subspace deformation, vertex blending, or enveloping. It runs in real-time even on a low-end hardware but it is also notorious for its failures, such as the collapsing-joints artifacts. We present a new algorithm which removes these shortcomings while maintaining almost the same time and memory complexity as the linear blend skinning. Unlike other approaches, our method works with exactly the same input data as the popular linear version. This minimizes the cost of upgrade from linear to spherical blend skinning in many existing applications: the data structures and models need no change at all. The paper discusses also theoretical properties of rotation interpolation, essential to spherical blend skinning.
accompanying video
Publication
Ladislav Kavan, Jiří Žára. Spherical Blend Skinning. Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games, 2005.
Links and Downloads
Paper
BibTeX
Acknowledgements
This work has been partly supported by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic under research program No.Y04/98:212300014 (Research in the area of information technologies and communications). We thank to Samuel Buss for providing the algorithm for spherical weighted averages [Buss and Fillmore 2001] and to LAPACK developers for their software. We would also like to thank to Jaroslav Semančík and the anonymous reviewers for valuable comments and to Adam J. Sporka for help with the accompanying video.
