Skinning With Deformable Chunks

This paper presents a new technique to generate skin deformations for articulated virtual characters. Deformable chunks are utilized to represent the internal structures of a character, and they are automatically generated beneath the skin depending on user specified patches on the skin. Powered by finite element method, these chunks can deform in a controllable manner according to the skeleton posture. The deformations of the chunks lead to natural deformation of the skin of the character. Intuitive rigs are devised to facilitate the adjustments of deformation results.We have demonstrated that most of the visual characteristics of skin deformations generated by real muscle contractions can be accomplished by our method