Analytic simplification of animated characters

Merry, B and Marais, P and Gain, J (2009) Analytic simplification of animated characters, Proceedings of Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Computer Graphics, Virtual Reality, Visualisation and Interaction in Africa (Afrigraph 09), February 2009, Pretoria, 37-45, ACM Press.

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Abstract

Traditionally, levels of detail (LOD) for animated characters are computed from a single pose. Later techniques refined this approach by considering a set of sample poses and evaluating a more representative error metric. A recent approach to the character animation problem, animation space, provides a framework for measuring error analytically. The work presented here uses the animation-space framework to derive two new techniques to improve the quality of LOD approximations. Firstly, we use an animation-space distance metric within a progressive mesh-based LOD scheme, giving results that are reasonable across a range of poses, without requiring that the pose space be sampled. Secondly, we simplify individual vertices by reducing the number of bones that influence them, using a constrained least-squares optimisation. This influence simplification is combined with the progressive mesh to form a single stream of simplifications. Influence simplification reduces the geometric error by up to an order of magnitude, and allows models to be simplified further than is possible with only a progressive mesh. Quantitative (geometric error metrics) and qualititative (user perceptual) experiements confirm that these new extensions provide significant improvements in quality over traditional, naïve simplification; and while there is naturally some impact on the speed of the off-line simplification process, it is not prohibitive.

Item Type:	Conference paper
Additional Information:	ISBN: 978-1-60558-428-7
Subjects:	Computing methodologies > Computer graphics
Date Deposited:	18 Mar 2009
Last Modified:	10 Oct 2019 15:34
URI:	http://pubs.cs.uct.ac.za/id/eprint/507

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