Fast Skeletal Animation by skinned Arc-Spline based Deformation

Presented is a novel skeletal animation system for providing high quality geometric deformations in real-time. Each bone of the skeleton is therefore represented by a spline, rather than using conventional matrix rotation. In our approach, each vertex of the animated character can be influenced by a maximum of three spline-curves, which is sufficient for skinned animation. One spline is parameterized by three control points and a possible twist. As opposed to conventional Bézier curves does our arc-spline rely on trigonometric functions for providing better curvatures. The optimized implementation using the OpenGL-shading language shows very promising results for real-time character animation, as even about 1 Million vertices were able to be transformed at interactive 43 frames per second on a GeForce 7800 GTX graphics card.