Mesh-based inverse kinematics

By Robert W. Sumner, Matthias Zwicker, Craig Gotsman, Jovan Popovic. ACM Transactions on Graphics, 2005

326 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The ability to position a small subset of mesh vertices and produce a meaningful overall deformation of the entire mesh is a fundamental task in mesh editing and animation. However, the class of meaningful deformations varies from mesh to mesh and depends on mesh kinematics, which prescribes valid mesh configurations, and a selection mechanism for choosing among them. Drawing an analogy to the traditional use of skeleton-based inverse kinematics for posing skeletons. we define mesh-based inverse kinematics as the problem of finding meaningful mesh deformations that meet specified vertex constraints.Our solution relies on example meshes to indicate the class of meaningful deformations. Each example is represented with a feature vector of deformation gradients that capture the affine transformations which individual triangles undergo relative to a reference pose. To pose a mesh, our algorithm efficiently searches among all meshes with specified vertex positions to find the one that is closest to some pose in a nonlinear span of the example feature vectors. Since the search is not restricted to the span of example shapes, this produces compelling deformations even when the constraints require poses that are different from those observed in the examples. Furthermore, because the span is formed by a nonlinear blend of the example feature vectors, the blending component of our system may also be used independently to pose meshes by specifying blending weights or to compute multi-way morph sequences.

Subfields: Computational Mechanics, Computer Graphics and Computer-Aided Design, Control and Systems Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2f298d71c01004b818a87ed952e40d832ad2232f

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Computational Mechanics

In Computer Graphics and Computer-Aided Design

In Control and Systems Engineering

Citations in the corpus

Practice and Theory of Blendshape Facial Models (2014, background): “[SZGP05] obtains the deformation gradients of a model in several poses, and blends them using a scheme that interpolates rotation separately from scale.”
NeRF-Editing: Geometry Editing of Neural Radiance Fields (2022, background): “With the proliferation of geometric models [3], datadriven deformation [15, 16, 61] becomes available which analyzes the deformation prior of existing shapes in the dataset and produces more realistic results.”
On Linear Variational Surface Deformation Methods (2008, background): “With the rapidly increasing computational power of today’s computers, nonlinear methods have become much more tractable, which already has led to a first set of nonlinear yet interactive mesh deformation approaches [4], [12], [31], [36], [53], [62], [66].”
Differential Representations for Mesh Processing (2006, methodology): “As mentioned by the authors of [65], a valid alternative for representation of the example space could be the pyramid coordinates [53].”
Subspace gradient domain mesh deformation (2006, methodology): “These artifacts can be greatly reduced by accurate anatomical simulation [Wilhelms and Gelder 1997] or by example-based synthesis [Lewis et al. 2000; Kry et al. 2002; Sumner et al. 2005].”