Title
NeuroSkinning: automatic skin binding for production characters with deep graph networks
Abstract
We present a deep-learning-based method to automatically compute skin weights for skeleton-based deformation of production characters. Given a character mesh and its associated skeleton hierarchy in rest pose, our method constructs a graph for the mesh, each node of which encodes the mesh-skeleton attributes of a vertex. An end-to-end deep graph convolution network is then introduced to learn the mesh-skeleton binding patterns from a set of character models with skin weights painted by artists. The network can be used to predict the skin weight map for a new character model, which describes how the skeleton hierarchy influences the mesh vertices during deformation. Our method is designed to work for non-manifold meshes with multiple disjoint or intersected components, which are common in game production and require complex skeleton hierarchies for animation control. We tested our method on the datasets of two commercial games. Experiments show that the predicted skin weight maps can be readily applied to characters in the production pipeline to generate high-quality deformations.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1145/3306346.3322969
ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG)
Keywords
Field
DocType
animation, deep learning, skinning
Computer vision,Skinning,Disjoint sets,Polygon mesh,Vertex (geometry),Convolution,Theoretical computer science,Animation,Artificial intelligence,Deep learning,Hierarchy,Mathematics
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
38
4
0730-0301
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
2
0.36
0
Authors
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Lijuan Liu120.36
Youyi Zheng244824.46
Di Tang3194.16
Yi Yuan4107.65
Changjie Fan55721.37
Kun Zhou63690159.79