Harmonic Skeleton for Realistic Character Animation

Grégoire Aujay (1) , Franck Hétroy (1) , Francis Lazarus (2) , Christine Depraz (1)

1 EVASION - Virtual environments for animation and image synthesis of natural objects
2 GIPSA-GPIG - GIPSA - Géométrie, Perception, Images, Geste

Current approaches to skeleton generation are based on topological and geometrical information only; this can be insufficient for realistic character animation, since the location of the joints does not usually match the real bone structure of the model. This paper proposes the use of anatomical information to enhance the skeleton. Using a harmonic function, this information can be recovered from the skeleton itself, which is guaranteed not to have undesired endpoints. The skeleton is computed as a Reeb graph of such a function over the surface of the model. Starting from one point selected on the head of the character, the entire process is fast, automatic and robust; it generates skeletons whose joints can be associated with the character's anatomy. Results are provided, including a quantitative validation of the generated skeletons.

Mots clés: animation skeleton; character animation; Reeb graph; semantic decomposition

Domaines: Synthèse d'image et réalité virtuelle [cs.GR]

Grégoire Aujay, Franck Hétroy, Francis Lazarus, Christine Depraz. Harmonic Skeleton for Realistic Character Animation. SCA 2007 - ACM-SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation, Aug 2007, San Diego, Californie, United States. pp.151-160, ⟨10.2312/SCA/SCA07/151-160⟩. ⟨inria-00151606v2⟩