Methods for Fast Skeleton Sketching and Eric Paquette, ACM SIGGRAPH, SIGGRAPH 2009 Conference, Talks Session, New Orleans, USA, 3-7 Aug, 2009.

Abstract

This work introduces different methods and concepts defining a fast and effective sketching interface for skeleton creation, including stroke embedding methods and a full-featured templating system. The defined paradigm allows the user to rapidly create a stroke which is semi-automatically converted to a skeleton. The method is based on a sketching interface that provides several input tools such as freehand strokes, polylines, stroke corrections, gestures, and automatic stroke embedding. From a stroke, the method create a skeleton based on various approaches such as direct polyline to bones, rule based automatic subdivision, and template retargeting. Tests were conducted with a number of professional users. The template retargeting method proved to be particularly useful when retargeting many similar limbs. Our preliminary study shows a promising increase in productivity, cutting down the time taken by the rigging process by an estimated 10 to 50%. We demonstrate through examples and professional user testing that a sketching metaphor can be adapted to deformation skeleton creation to definitely speed up the creation and adaptation process in a fluid and effective way. Our implementation can rig typical characters with the use of an effective stroke embedding method and with automatic user-definable template retargeting.

Keywords

BibTeX entry

@InProceedings{Poirier:2009:GI,
  author =       "Martin Poirier and Eric Paquette",
  title =        "Methods for Fast Skeleton Sketching",
  booktitle =    "ACM SIGGRAPH, SIGGRAPH 2009 Conference, Talks Session",
  pages =        "???-???",
  year =         "2009",
}

Online version

Adobe PDF version of the paper.

Additional material

Video demonstrating the use of the system and several results.

Presentation and corresponding videos.

The sketching interface is fully implemented in Blender.