Anatomically based modeling

We describe an improved, anatomically based approach to modeling and animating animals. Underlying muscles, bones, and generalized tissue are modeled as triangle meshes or ellipsoids. Muscles are deformable discretized cylinders lying between fixed origins and insertions on specific bones. Default rest muscle shapes can be used, or the rest muscle shape can be designed by the user with a small set of parameters. Muscles automatically change shape as the joints move. Skin is generated by voxelizing the underlying components, filtering, and extracting a polygonal isosurface. Isosurface skin vertices are associated with underlying components and move with them during joint motion. Skin motion is consistent with an elastic membrane model. All components are parameterized and can be reused on similar bodies with non-uniformly scaled parts. This parameterization allows a non-uniformly sampled skin to be extracted, maintaining more details at the head and extremities.