Robust Biharmonic Skinning Using Geometric Fields
Author(s)
Dodik, Ana
Sitzmann, Vincent
Solomon, Justin
Stein, Oded
Date Issued
October 28, 2025
Journal
ACM Transactions on Graphics
Publisher
ACM
Citation
Ana Dodik, Vincent Sitzmann, Justin Solomon, and Oded Stein. 2025. Robust Biharmonic Skinning Using Geometric Fields. ACM Trans. Graph. Just Accepted (October 2025).
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Bounded bihramonic weights are a popular tool used to rig and deform characters for animation, to compute reduced-order simulations, and to define feature descriptors for geometry processing. They necessitate tetrahedralizing the volume bounded by the surface, introducing the possibility of meshing artifacts or tetrahedralization failure. We introduce a mesh-free and robust automatic skinning technique that generates weights comparable to the current state of the art, but works reliably even on open surfaces, triangle soups, and point clouds where current methods fail. We achieve this through the use of a specialized Lagrangian representation enabled by the advent of hardware ray-tracing, which circumvents the need for finite elements while optimizing the biharmonic energy and enforcing boundary conditions. The flexibility of our formulation allows us to integrate artistic control through weight painting during the optimization. We offer a thorough qualitative and quantitative evaluation of our method.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1145/3771928
