Real-time mesh animation from low dimensional positional constraints

The challenge proposed by this study is to reconsider the entire animation pipeline for data-driven character animation. By observing that significant loss of information and precision occur in the traditional animation pipeline (skeleton reconstruction from markers, rigging and retargeting), our goal is to directly control at interactive framerates articulated meshes from a low number of positional constraints. Our method builds on top of efficient deformation techniques and proceeds as follows: an original mesh is embedded into a coarse volumetric control lattice which contains simplified information from the initial reference mesh, skeleton elements and marker locations. An iterative method is applied on this structure which preserves the geometry details, the bones lengths, and the associated joint limits. We show the ability of our approach to animate and interactively deform high resolution models from a low-number of markers while retaining the subtleties of the motion. It notably allows to entirely skip the tedious rigging phase