Velocity Skinning for Real-time Stylized Skeletal Animation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a real-time, artist-controllable skinning method that adds stylized secondary effects to skeletal animations, enhancing physicality and expressiveness in character animation pipelines.

Contribution

A novel, GPU-compatible framework that derives per-vertex deformations from skeletal velocities to produce stylized secondary animations in real-time.

Findings

Enables real-time stylized effects like squashing and floppy motions.

Supports artist control through a simple painting interface.

Works efficiently on large meshes within standard animation workflows.

Abstract

Secondary animation effects are essential for liveliness. We propose a simple, real-time solution for adding them on top of standard skinning, enabling artist-driven stylization of skeletal motion. Our method takes a standard skeleton animation as input, along with a skin mesh and rig weights. It then derives per-vertex deformations from the different linear and angular velocities along the skeletal hierarchy. We highlight two specific applications of this general framework, namely the cartoonlike "squashy" and "floppy" effects, achieved from specific combinations of velocity terms. As our results show, combining these effects enables to mimic, enhance and stylize physical-looking behaviours within a standard animation pipeline, for arbitrary skinned characters. Interactive on CPU, our method allows for GPU implementation, yielding real-time performances even on large meshes. Animator control is supported through a simple interface toolkit, enabling to refine the desired type and magnitude of deformation at relevant vertices by simply painting weights. The resulting rigged character automatically responds to new skeletal animation, without further input.