Representing and Manipulating Mesh-Based Character Animations

We propose a new approach to represent and manipulate a mesh-based character animation preserving its time-varying details. Our method first decomposes the input mesh animation into coarse and fine deformation components. A model for the coarse deformations is constructed by an underlying kinematic skeleton structure and blending skinning weights. Thereafter, a non-linear probabilistic model is used to encode the fine time-varying details of the input animation. The user can manipulate the corresponding skeleton-based component of the input, which can be done by any standard animation package, and the final result is generated including its important time-varying details. By converting an input sample animation into our new hybrid representation, we are able to maintain the flexibility of mesh-based methods during animation creation while allowing for practical manipulations using the standard skeleton-based paradigm. We demonstrate the performance of our method by converting and editing several mesh animations generated by different performance capture approaches.