Automatic skeleton generation and character skinning

Abstract

An articulated character skinning usually requires manual skeleton embedding and vertex weight painting. We propose a fast and automatic method for skeleton generation and character skinning. First, we segment the given character mesh by the sequential steps of NCV(normal characteristic value) computation, segment points refinement, and principal component analysis of segment clusters. Then, two types of joints and a skeleton are generated based on the mesh segmentation result. Furthermore, we compute weights of vertices influenced by skeleton automatically and then skinning the character mesh by skeleton driven and muscle pushing algorithm. Experimental results show that our method achieves both high visual quality and fast speed. It could be used in character animation and VR real time applications.