Using rigging and transfer to animate 3D characters

Abstract

Transferring a mesh or skeletal animation onto a new mesh currently requires significant manual effort. For skeletal animations, this involves rigging the character, by specifying how the skeleton is positioned relative to the character and how posing the skeleton drives the character's shape. Currently, artists typically manually position the skeleton joints and paint skinning weights onto the character to associate points on the character surface with bones. For this problem, we present a fully automatic rigging algorithm based on the geometry of the target mesh. Given a generic skeleton, the method computes both joint placement and the character surface attachment automatically. For mesh animations, current techniques are limited to transferring the motion literally using a correspondence between the characters' surfaces. Instead, I propose an example-based method that can transfer motion between far more different characters and that gives the user more control over how to adapt the motion to the new character.