The smoothed 3D skeleton for animation

Abstract

Skeleton is at the main interest of 3D character animation. In this paper, we use a recent skeleton pruning method based on the medial axis transform and the geodesic distance function that originates one-voxel thick, graph-like skeleton. Unfortunately, the location of skeleton joints does not usually match the anatomical joint of the model. We introduce a novel method for smoothing the pruned skeleton for realistic character animation by using the filtering process for adjusting the locations of consecutive points along the skeleton. Chord-to-point distance accumulation then be applied, and the smoothed skeleton is split in order to create segments and joints corresponding to its shape. The new skeleton can be regenerated later on. Therefore, the new skeleton produced from the proposed method can capture the essential shape characteristics in a compact form, while preserving the meaningful anatomical information of the 3D character models. The demonstration of the approach with several examples is also provided. © 2009 IEEE.