Real-Time Weighted Pose-Space Deformation on the GPU

WPSD (Weighted Pose Space Deformation) is an example based skinning method for articulated body animation. The per-vertex computation required in WPSD can be parallelized in a SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) manner and implemented on a GPU. While such vertex-parallel computation is often done on the GPU vertex processors, further parallelism can potentially be obtained by using the fragment processors. In this paper, we develop a parallel deformation method using the GPU fragment processors. Joint weights for each vertex are automatically calculated from sample poses, thereby reducing manual effort and enhancing the quality of WPSD as well as SSD (Skeletal Subspace Deformation). We show sufficient speed-up of SSD, PSD (Pose Space Deformation) and WPSD to make them suitable for real-time applications.