CMU VASC seminar: Skinning Mesh Animations

Doug L. James
School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University

In this talk, I will present our recent work on parameterization of deformable animations to enable efficient processing. Given a skeleton-free mesh animation, I will present an automatic and robust algorithm to generate a progressive "skinned" mesh approximation--a generalization of techniques used to animate characters in video games. "Skinned mesh animations" provide optimized hardware rendering, level of detail, and output-sensitive collision detection for mesh animations. The key insight of our algorithm is that mean shift clustering of high-dimensional triangle rotation sequences can be used for efficient and robust estimation of near-rigid mesh structure.

Related Publication:
Skinning Mesh Animations,
Doug L. James and Christopher D. Twigg,
ACM Transactions on Graphics, 24(3), pages 399-407, July, 2005.
http://graphics.cs.cmu.edu/projects/sma

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Doug L. James has been an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University since Fall 2002. He received his Ph.D. from the Institute of Applied Mathematics at the University of British Columbia advised by Dinesh K. Pai. Doug is a recipient of an NSF Early Career Development Award for his work on "Precomputing Data-driven Deformable Systems for Multimodal Interactive Simulation," and was chosen as one of Popular Science magazine's "Brilliant 10" young scientists for 2005.