Bulging-free dual quaternion skinning

Abstract

The linear blend skinning has been the most popular skeletal animation algorithm and also notorious for the collapsing-joint and candy-wrapper artifacts. The dual quaternion skinning (DQS) successfully resolves the problems, but it reveals its own artifacts, which we name bulging joint and distorted normal. We propose to post-process the DQS algorithm; the bulging-joint artifact can be removed by correcting the vertex positions, and the distorted-normal artifact can be removed by correcting the vertex normals. The proposed method is simple yet quite effective. The experimental results show that the skinning animation quality is significantly improved. Copyright (c) 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.