Implicit skinning

I’m not sure this has already been posted here, so I propose it anyway; this (or something similar) would be sooo nice to have in Blender…

Yes, you can see the complete paper here :
http://irit.fr/~Rodolphe.Vaillant/?e=31

This could be a very great addition. It has been a long time since last evolution for skinning…

Yes please!!

Wow, I’m surprised this isn’t getting more attention. This would be an amazing tool for artists to have and would save a crazy amount of time.

Actually I think this was posted before. can’t seem to find it though. But yeah, pretty cool stuff. :slight_smile:

Just catching up on a bit of forum backlog and wow. This looks great!

On a practical note, would a first step be finding an interested developer to get some sort of an idea for effort involved? If there is a legal roadblock or there is no one interested that has the time or it’s just too utterly complex and incompatible with Blender, then we’ll be patient as always with this sort of thing.

However, if it was looking to be a manageable task in the long term, I’m pretty sure this would be an interesting target for some specific crowd funding. At a guess (from an artist perspective at least) it would be well beyond the scope of a GSOC project for example.

Naturally I’m not thinking of raising enough cash to lure someone like Brecht or Campbell away from Blender Development funding and its targets. That would be rather counter productive for Blender as a whole.

Still, maybe it is just daydream territory for a bit.

Ton contacted the author :slight_smile:

IMHO this is fully doable in blender.

The algorithm (assuming I understand it correctly) isn’t all that hard:

  • Calculate vertex/bone weights on undeformed model
  • Deform geometry (armature or whatever)
  • Move deformed verts based on the difference between calculated weights and current weights
  • Smooth mesh using poisson smoothing function
  • Goto step 3

The paper suggests to do all the steps every frame but you could probably bake step 1 like the mesh deform modifier does.

It’s funny, got frustrated that I couldn’t understand all the math in the paper so signed up for ‘Coding the Matrix: Linear Algebra Through Computer Science Applications’ at Coursera.

Oh cool! Great to know, thanks. :slight_smile:

Just to pop up this thread in case someone missed the news from dev minute 13/12/22 :

Ton Roosendaal had mail from this team: http://irit.fr/~Rodolphe.Vaillant/?e=31
Implicit Skinning is close to a source release. We need to find someone who’s interested to help getting this in Blender.

Hope someone ll get love with it :slight_smile:

Yeah. Tremendous potential for Blender rigging. Obviously caught the Dev’s eyes.