Skinned Motion Retargeting with Dense Geometric Interaction Perception

TL;DR

This paper introduces MeshRet, a novel motion retargeting framework that models dense geometric interactions to improve contact preservation and prevent interpenetration in skinned character animations.

Contribution

MeshRet directly models dense geometric interactions using a new DMI field, effectively addressing conflicts between skeleton motion and geometry correction in retargeting.

Findings

Achieves state-of-the-art performance on Mixamo and ScanRet datasets.

Effectively preserves contact and prevents interpenetration.

Outperforms existing methods in motion retargeting quality.

Abstract

Capturing and maintaining geometric interactions among different body parts is crucial for successful motion retargeting in skinned characters. Existing approaches often overlook body geometries or add a geometry correction stage after skeletal motion retargeting. This results in conflicts between skeleton interaction and geometry correction, leading to issues such as jittery, interpenetration, and contact mismatches. To address these challenges, we introduce a new retargeting framework, MeshRet, which directly models the dense geometric interactions in motion retargeting. Initially, we establish dense mesh correspondences between characters using semantically consistent sensors (SCS), effective across diverse mesh topologies. Subsequently, we develop a novel spatio-temporal representation called the dense mesh interaction (DMI) field. This field, a collection of interacting SCS feature vectors, skillfully captures both contact and non-contact interactions between body geometries. By aligning the DMI field during retargeting, MeshRet not only preserves motion semantics but also prevents self-interpenetration and ensures contact preservation. Extensive experiments on the public Mixamo dataset and our newly-collected ScanRet dataset demonstrate that MeshRet achieves state-of-the-art performance. Code available at https://github.com/abcyzj/MeshRet.