Position-Based Simulation of Skeleton-Driven Characters

Abstract

The rise of skeletal skinning technology has provided great convenience for animators. At the same time, it improves the efficiency of animation production. However, the deformation resulting from this technology suffers from some undesirable effects, which require manual improvement. In this paper, we propose an approach addressing the problem of creating believable mesh-based skin deformation. In this approach, the skin is first deformed with a classic linear blend skinning approach, which usually lead to artifacts like the candy-wrapper effect or volume loss. Then we enforce the geometric constraints which displace the positions of the vertices to mimic the behavior of the skin and achieve effects like volume preservation. At last, we adopt the finite element method to handle large deformed elements which could accelerate the system’s convergence rate. This approach is easy to implement and has a high skinning efficiency without affecting the simulating effect.