Research On Technology Of Skin Skeletal Binding

Computer Animation has been progressing very fast these years, along with the rapid development of film and game (entertainment) industry. Through the many types of computer animation, skeletal animation is one of the most popular kinds because of its advantage on representing the character's motion.The first paper researched on skeletal animation and implemented soft skinning method was published 1998 on the magazine of "Game Developer", then the skinning algorithm became a very hot topic in research area. Skinning method is also known as skeletal subspace deformation (SSD) and vertex blending; it's the most important algorithm in skeletal animation which decides the final result of skin deformation.The research of skinning technique can be divided into two parts, one is concerned with the skin-skeletal binding procedure, the other is concerned with the skinning algorithm; this thesis covers both sides, provides detailed description and makes my own contribution in between. By implementing and analyzing the vertex blending and bones blending skinning algorithms, we introduce a new skinning technique called synthesis blending algorithm, which provides an improved bone blending algorithm with low computation complexity and some other combined methods to provide high performance and easy working.Binding procedure is mostly related with the practice, and we introduce a new binding procedure consulting some famous 3D software like Maya and 3DSMax. By analyzing the every step in this procedure, we provide and implemented several new algorithm to solve the time consuming problems in the skinning operation.At the same time of academic studying, I have also designed and implemented a skeletal animation system to try new methods and traditional thoughts, and give an output skeletal animation file for the further study. It has also provided common interface for other system to use these output files.After introducing some backgrounds of computer animation and skeletal animation techniques in chapter 1; we give a detailed description of new binding procedure in chapter 2; and after discussing traditional skinning algorithms by their advantages and disadvantages in chapter 3, we come up with new skinning method in chapter 4; finally, we introduce briefly our skeletal animation system, especially its design matters in chapter 5.