Methods for Fast Skeleton Sketching Martin Poirier and Eric Paquette, ACM SIGGRAPH, SIGGRAPH 2009 Conference, Talks Session, New Orleans, USA, 3-7 Aug, 2009.

Abstract

This work introduces different methods and concepts defining a fast and effective sketching interface for skeleton creation, including stroke embedding methods and a full-featured templating system. The defined paradigm allows the user to rapidly create a stroke which is semi-automatically converted to a skeleton. The method is based on a sketching interface that provides several input tools such as freehand strokes, polylines, stroke corrections, gestures, and automatic stroke embedding. From a stroke, the method create a skeleton based on various approaches such as direct polyline to bones, rule based automatic subdivision, and template retargeting. Tests were conducted with a number of professional users. The template retargeting method proved to be particularly useful when retargeting many similar limbs. Our preliminary study shows a promising increase in productivity, cutting down the time taken by the rigging process by an estimated 10 to 50%. We demonstrate through examples and professional user testing that a sketching metaphor can be adapted to deformation skeleton creation to definitely speed up the creation and adaptation process in a fluid and effective way. Our implementation can rig typical characters with the use of an effective stroke embedding method and with automatic user-definable template retargeting.

Keywords

BibTeX entry

@InProceedings{Poirier:2009:GI,
  author =       "Martin Poirier and Eric Paquette",
  title =        "Methods for Fast Skeleton Sketching",
  booktitle =    "ACM SIGGRAPH, SIGGRAPH 2009 Conference, Talks Session",
  year =         "2009",
}

Online version

PDF of the paper.

Additional material

Slides from the presentation.

The sketching interface is fully implemented in Blender.

Video presenting the approach and demonstrating the results: