A modular approach to hardware-accelerated deformable modeling and animation

Deformable objects are those whose shape over time cannot be described by a simple rigid movement. The addition of deformable objects to a virtual scene not only increases realism but also broadens the application's utility. People and clothing are examples of important object classes that cannot be realistically portrayed without modeling deformation. Unfortunately, whereas rigid body motions have standard APIs such as OpenGL and Direct3D, existing animation systems treat deformation as a collection of special cases.; Supporting deformable objects in an animation system traditionally requires building a specific deformation engine for each type of deformation needed. These deformation engines may overlap in terms of both algorithmic components and function. Such overlap leads us to question whether a single “general” approach to deformation is possible. Can a variety of different approaches and algorithms be subsumed under a common framework and API? And if this is possible, can it be integrated with existing 3D graphics hardware architectures?; My approach partitions the computation of general character animation deformation into global and local computations. Global computations are those that require knowledge of other primitives whereas local computations require only a small set of parameters. By identifying the common set of operations underlying several different deformation primitives, I develop a generalized hardware-accelerated framework for deformation. Due to this hardware design's flexibility and simplicity, it provides a basis for a standard deformation API.