Animation Setup Transfer for 3D Characters Quentin Avril, Donya Ghafourzadeh, Srinivasan Ramachandran, Sahel Fallahdoust, Sarah Ribet, Olivier Dionne, Martin de Lasa, and Eric Paquette, Computer Graphics Forum, 35 (2), pp. 115-126, 2016.

Abstract

We present a general method for transferring skeletons and skinning weights between characters with distinct mesh topologies. Our pipeline takes as inputs a source character rig (consisting of a mesh, a transformation hierarchy of joints, and skinning weights) and a target character mesh. From these inputs, we compute joint locations and orientations that embed the source skeleton in the target mesh, as well as skinning weights to bind the target geometry to the new skeleton. Our method consists of two key steps. We first compute the geometric correspondence between source and target meshes using a semi-automatic method relying on a set of markers. The resulting geometric correspondence is then used to formulate attribute transfer as an energy minimization and filtering problem. We demonstrate our approach on a variety of source and target bipedal characters, varying in mesh topology and morphology. Several examples demonstrate that the target characters behave well when animated with either forward or inverse kinematics. Via these examples, we show that our method preserves subtle artistic variations; spatial relationships between geometry and joints, as well as skinning weight details, are accurately maintained. Our proposed pipeline opens up many exciting possibilities to quickly animate novel characters by reusing existing production assets.

Keywords

Animation, Skeleon, Animation Setup, Vertex Weight, Geometric Correspondence

BibTeX entry

@Article{April:2016:CGF,
  author =       "Quentin Avril and Donya Ghafourzadeh and Srinivasan Ramachandran and Sahel Fallahdoust and Sarah Ribet and Olivier Dionne and Martin de Lasa and Eric Paquette",
  title =        "Animation Setup Transfer for 3D Characters",
  journal =      "Computer Graphics Forum",
  pages =        "115--126",
  volume =       35,
  number =       2,
  year =         "2016",
}

Online version

Preliminary version of the paper.

Additional material

Slides from our presentation at Eurographics.

Pre-print version of the video: