Example-based deformation with support joints

In character animation field, many deformation techniques have been proposed. Example-based deformation methods are widely used especially for interactive applications. Example-based methods are mainly divided into two types. One is Interpolation. Methods in this type are designed to interpolate examples in a pose space. The advantage is that the deformed meshes can precisely correspond to the example meshes. On the other hand, the disadvantage is that larger number of examples is needed to generate arbitrary plausible interpolated meshes between each example. The other is Example-based Skinning which optimizes particular parameters referencing examples to represent example meshes as accurately as possible. These methods provide plausible deformations with fewer examples. However they cannot perfectly depict example meshes. In this paper, we present an idea that combines techniques belonging to the two types, taking advantages of both types. We propose an example-based skinning method to be combined with Pose Space Deformation (PSD). It optimizes transformation matrices in Skeleton Subspace deformation (SSD) introducing "support joints". Our method itself generates plausible intermediate meshes with a small set of examples as well as other example-based skinning methods. Then we explain the benefit of combining our method with PSD. We show that provided examples are precisely represented and plausible deformations at arbitrary poses are obtained by our integrated method.