Particle Based Skinning

When deforming a shape by skinning in character animation, we may encounter unexpected results such as surface collapse and shape shrinkage. In this article, we propose an improved skinning method that preserves volume through deformation and prevents such shape contraction by using particles that have interaction forces affecting each other. In this method, the interaction forces working among the particles enable them to keep a constant distance from each other, and the volume is mostly preserved because the number of particles is unchanged during deformation. The particles are associated with fixed points on a skeleton, and their position and motion are controlled as if they adhere to the skeleton. Vertex positions on a surface of the shape are then fixed according to an arrangement of particles to generate the deformed object shape. We compare the deformation result of the proposed method with the result of the skinning using conventional vertex blending and show the validity of the proposed method.