Velocity Skinning for Real-time Stylized Skeletal Animation

Secondary animation effects are essential for liveliness. We propose a simple, real-time solution for adding them on top of standard skinning, enabling artist-driven stylization of skeletal motion. Our method takes a standard skeleton animation as input, along with a skin mesh and rig weights. It then derives per-vertex deformations from the different linear and angular velocities along the skeletal hierarchy. We highlight two specific applications of this general framework, namely the cartoon-like squashy and floppy effects, achieved from specific combinations of velocity terms. As our results show, combining these effects enables to mimic, enhance and stylize physical-looking behaviours within a standard animation pipeline, for arbitrary skinned characters. Interactive on CPU, our method allows for GPU implementation, yielding real-time performances even on large meshes. Animator control is supported through a simple interface toolkit, enabling to refine the desired type and magnitude of deformation at relevant vertices by simply painting weights. The resulting rigged character automatically responds to new skeletal animation, without further input.

Automated summary

Secondary animation effects are important for creating lively animations. This method proposes a real-time solution for adding secondary animation effects on top of standard skinning, allowing for interactive control and stylization of skeletal motion. By combining specific velocity terms, cartoon-like squashy and floppy effects can be achieved, enhancing and stylizing physical-looking behaviors for arbitrary skinned characters in a standard animation pipeline.