Muscle pushing based skin deformation on GPU

Muscle-based skin deformation could produce detailed visual quality. However, it always requires tedious labor work and the rendering speed is usually slow. In this paper, we propose a fast skin deformation method based on the common three-layer model, including skeleton, muscle and skin layer. First, Skeleton-driven smooth skinning technique is adopted to get the basic skinning effect. Then, a muscle pushing algorithm is developed to simulate the influence of muscles on the skin. By combining two phases, appealing skin deformation is achieved. Furthermore, this process could be easily implemented on GPU without much preparation work. Experimental results show that our method achieves both high visual quality and fast rendering speed. It could be used in character animation and VR real time applications.