Skeletal Animation by Spline aligned Deformation on the GPU

摘要

Presented is a skeletal animation system for providing high quality geometric deformations in real-time. Each bone of the skeleton is therefore represented by a spline, rather than using conventional rotation matrix. Our approach allows each vertex of the animated character to be influenced by a maximum of three spline-curves, which is sufficient for skinned animation. One spline is defined by three control points and a possible twist. As opposed to conventional Be'zier curves, our arc-spline relies on trigonometric functions for providing better curvatures. The optimized implementation using the OpenGL-shading language GLSL shows very promising results for real-time character animation, as even about 1 Million vertices were able to be transformed at interactive 43 frames per second on a GeForce 7800 GTX graphics card. Our method can further seamlessly be integrated in existing animation systems such as skeletal subspace deformation or pose space deformation, since the basic skinning algorithm is very similar.