Position-Based Skinning for Soft Articulated Characters

Journal article, 2015

In this paper, we introduce a two-layered approach addressing the problem of creating believable mesh-based skin deformation. For each frame, the skin is first deformed with a classic linear blend skinning approach, which usually leads to unsightly artefacts such as the well-known candy-wrapper effect and volume loss. Then we enforce some geometric constraints which displace the positions of the vertices to mimic the behaviour of the skin and achieve effects like volume preservation and jiggling. We allow the artist to control the amount of jiggling and the area of the skin affected by it. The geometric constraints are solved using a position-based dynamics (PBDs) schema. We employ a graph colouring algorithm for parallelizing the computation of the constraints. Being based on PBDs guarantees efficiency and real-time performances while enduring robustness and unconditional stability. We demonstrate the visual quality and the performance of our approach with a variety of skeleton-driven soft body characters.