Skeleton Driven Laplacian Volumetric Deformation

This paper proposes a novel mesh animation technique which combines the flexible interactive control of skeleton based animation rigs with volumetric mesh deformation to avoid mesh collapse and self-intersection under folding and twisting motion. Our solution combines the industry standard Linear Skin Blending with a mesh based volumetric deformation approach. Linear Skin Blending is used to attach and efficiently animate a small number of points with a skeletal control rig. These points provide constraints for a Laplacian mesh deformation scheme which solves for the mesh which satisfies the constraints and gives minimum volume deformation of a tetrahedralization of the mesh vertices. This approach allows rigging and animation of high-resolution captured surface meshes from multiple view video or 3D scans. Interactive skeleton driven animation is achieved for meshes of several thousand vertices without the known drawbacks of Linear Skin Blending, mesh collapse around joints and the ´candy wrapper effect´.