Stretch It - Realistic Smooth Skinning

Smooth skinning is still the most popular method for the animation of deformable human and creature characters. It has became almost an industry standard because of its intuitiveness to use and efficiency to compute. However it suffers from a number of problems, such as the collapsing elbow and candy-wrapper effect. In this paper, we present a new method, which is able to solve these defects with very little extra stretching computations. The advantage of this method is its compatibility with the current animation workflow. The animator can change the skin weight any way they like and therefore it favours creativity. The aim of our method is trying to retain the realism and computational efficiency at the same time. It is suitable for situations, where real time response is necessary, like computer games. A practical implementation in the form of a Maya plug-in is created to demonstrate the viability of the method