Transplanting and editing animations on skinned meshes

Abstract

Skinned Mesh Animation (SMA) well approximates a mesh animation with extracted bones and their transformations. However, unlike skeleton, bones in SMA are not organized in hierarchies, thus they need mesh dependent translation vectors which prevent other sources of motion (i.e. skeletal animations, MoCAP, SMAs etc) from being applied to the skinned mesh. In this paper, we propose a new and fast method to transplant motion to skinned meshes. By efficiently solving a linear least-squares system, we can compute new translation vectors which enable the motion to work on the skinned mesh. Based on the same idea, we have also devised a SMA editing tool which allows users to edit frames of the SMA interactively. Furthermore, the editing can be propagated to all subsequent frames. © 2007 IEEE.