Real-time Deformation with Coupled Cages and Skeletons

TL;DR

This paper introduces a real-time deformation framework that seamlessly integrates skeleton-based and cage-based techniques, expanding deformation capabilities and improving user control in digital shape manipulation.

Contribution

It presents a novel coupling of skeletons and cages, enabling combined deformation spaces and compatibility with existing skinning and cage deformation methods.

Findings

Enables real-time hybrid deformation combining skeletons and cages.

Expands deformation space beyond individual skeleton or cage methods.

Compatible with existing deformation tools and techniques.

Abstract

Skeleton-based and cage-based deformation techniques represent the two most popular approaches to control real-time deformations of digital shapes and are, to a vast extent, complementary to one another. Despite their complementary roles, high-end modeling packages do not allow for seamless integration of such control structures, thus inducing a considerable burden on the user to maintain them synchronized. In this paper, we propose a framework that seamlessly combines rigging skeletons and deformation cages, granting artists with a real-time deformation system that operates using any smooth combination of the two approaches. By coupling the deformation spaces of cages and skeletons, we access a much larger space, containing poses that are impossible to obtain by acting solely on a skeleton or a cage. Our method is oblivious to the specific techniques used to perform skinning and cage-based deformation, securing it compatible with pre-existing tools. We demonstrate the usefulness of our hybrid approach on a variety of examples.