Skeleton driven animation based on implicit skinning

Skeleton-driven animation methods have been commonly used in animating 3D characters. In these methods, a skinning process that binds the character surface onto the skeleton is required. This process is usually accomplished manually and is a time-consuming task. In this paper, we propose a novel method for automatically skinning skeletal character models. Given the motion of a skeleton, our method can animate the character model automatically. In our method, each joint coordinate is parameterized by its surrounding local surface. In such a way, the character's surface is implicitly bound onto the skeleton. Character animation is achieved by minimizing an energy function that is carefully designed to prevent unnatural volume changes and to guarantee smooth deformations. Experiments demonstrate the efficiency and excellent performance of our method.