Elastic Implicit Skinning (SIGGRAPH ASIA 2014)

The video accompanying our SIGGRAPH ASIA 2014 research paper: "Robust Iso-Surface Tracking for Interactive Charater Skinning"
More on the official Elastic Implicit Skinning project's page:
rodolphe-vailla...
Related work:
vimeo.com/6596... // Original Implicit Skinning
vimeo.com/5792... // Blending operators enabling our work
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Remarks:
This work is a RESEARCH project this means:
- Elastic Implicit Skinning is implemented as a CUDA standalone application there is currently no plugins for Blender, 3DSmax, Maya... yet. However if you are interested by this technology we are open to collaborations (contact us for more details rodolphe-vailla..., www.irit.fr/~Lo...)
- 90% of the programming, animation and rendering work was done by a single person whose never been specifically trained in any artistic work (there is of course a team doing the theoretical research and 3D characters are provided by third parties)
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Paper abstract:
We present a novel approach for interactive character skinning, which takes advantage of the best features of the recent implicit skinning method, and make it robust to extreme character movements, such as those involving contacts between different parts of the skin and sharp bending angles at joints. While keeping the basic idea of implicit skinning, namely approximate the character at each animation step by a 3D scalar field in which mesh-vertices are appropriately re-projected, we depart from the processing pipeline used so far. Instead of being bound by an initial skinning solution, used to initialize the shape at each time step, we use the skin mesh to directly track iso-surfaces of the field over time. Achieving this requires solving two challenging problems: firstly, all contact surfaces generated between skin parts should be captured as iso-surfaces of the implicit field; secondly, the tracking method should capture elastic skin effects when the joints bend, but also insure that the skin comes back to its rest shape when the character comes back to rest. Our solutions to these problems include: new composition operators enabling the combination of blending effects with local self-contact between implicit surfaces, and a tangential relaxation scheme derived from the as-rigid-as possible energy to solve the tracking problem.The result is a very robust interactive system that can handle contacts in a way that is visually plausible, exhibits the global effect of skin elasticity (sliding), and is suitable for use in a production pipeline.
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Authors:
Rodolphe Vaillant(1,2), Gaël Guennebaud(3), Loïc Barthe(1), Brian Wyvill(2), Marie-Paule Cani(4)
(1)IRIT - Université de Toulouse, (2)University of Victoria, (3)Inria Bordeaux, (4)LJK - Grenoble Universités - Inria
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Acknowledgments:
We thank artists, companies and universities who provided us with nice 3D models and animations. Laura Paiardini (laurapaiardini....) from Inria Grenoble provided us with the skeleton animation of the Armadillo and Garrett Pond (garrettpond.blo...) from Brigham Young University (BYU) modeled Jeff model (vimeo.com/61555...) wich is the big guy from the short movie 'Owned' (animation.byu.e.... Finally the famous armadillo model comes from the Standford university 3D scan repository.
We also thank the blender foundation as 90% of our renderings are done with Blender with either the "cycle renderer" or the "internal renderer".
This work has been partially funded by the IM&M project www.irit.fr/~Lo... (ANR-11-JS02-007) and the advanced grant EXPRESSIVE from the European Research council. Partial funding also comes from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the GRAND NCE, Canada and Intel Corps. Finally, this work received partial support from the Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award.

[@hazemmahmoud5774]

This method ((ELASTIC Implicit Skinning)) looks very efficient, we are now in 2019 & still not available in major 3d softwares, sadly :(

[@Themindforest]

This is beautiful work! This would save riggers and animators so much time, and the results you demonstrated look fantastic. I'd love to see this tech available in popular 3D apps someday soon. Good luck!

[@umarcga7823]

But I have seen no one apply this technique yet. And I am also watching this since late 2020 like 2016 and no one did anything with it yet not even big studios.

[@autbo]

Blender needs this.

[@GameDevAraz]

Blender Needs A Real Time Muscle Simulation System, Like Weta Or Ziva Both For Maya

[@superscatboy]

@@GameDevAraz Step away from the shift key.

[@psy237]

@@superscatboy seems he's the one creating all the game title logos in the company :'D

[@ThatZommy]

Every time I see the armadillo at 4:50 I can't help but think of the HOLIDAY ARMADILLO

[@RobertDigitalArtist]

Still just research or can we get the (standalone) software of it?

[@mishominas]

why you don't offer your product to Autodesk Maya

[@aiber3303]

Amazing work!

[@newteknix5691]

I would pay for a plugin for this in maya

[@stealthbrandon]

find a programmer that could do this Lol. it like alot of stuff I see in siggraph not sure why people ignore it

[@newteknix5691]

I completely agree after experimenting with standard this is far better. And a big time saver I believe this guy had a standalone, but I had never looked into it.

[@dejayrezme8617]

Brilliant. How fast is this for games (multiple characters high frame rate) and how well does this work for clothing?

[@MajoraZ]

Any chance this could be made into a plugin for 3ds max?

[@pablomonfortgames6723]

this is awesome, is there any news if this can be integrated with Unity ? or if would be in future? or if there is any game engine that can use this technique for skinning can you tell me? please! . and Thanks for the video , great video I love it :D

[@this_is_japes7409]

is there anywhere to get the code for this, or at the very least an in-depth explanation of the algorithm?

[@robosergTV]

+RothranAgnos very funny. You have to pay, obviously

[@Teturarsyra]

+RothranAgnos First link in the description, code is freely available.

[@incbyakyabyakya6275]

+Teturarsyra , there is still no plugin for blender?

[@umarcga7823]

how can we apply this link to the research and paper are online

[@mmnissanzroadster9]

Don't you want skin creases though? I mean if you look at fatter people, their rolls tend to have creases. Or is there another step, and faking that crease? And not only fat people, but when you bend your arm, your skin doesn't shrink, it folds.

[@pablomonfortgames6723]

its seems they sacrificed that reality part to a more stunning looking 3d model final visualization, I'm agree with you, but I'm agree with the fact that, the glitches of the other techniques looks bad in 3d and virtuality, so I think that elastic implicit skinning technique its awesome, I wish to be as smart as this guys so I can implement this technique on my own game . coz I want it for games more then animations , but would be nice to see this into unity and all gpu instanced and running smooth with blendshapes and all :(

[@SaurusWarriorSotek]

This it's amazing

[@edgarprotsko1558]

And what is it now?

[@Polytricity]

I need this for max, is it out as a plug in yet?

[@cgcircuitLLC]

Is there a way to get this for Maya?

[@tigerija]

murtisoft But broken. :D

[@Phasewalker2084]

This is great but how can we use it for games??

[@jacobmartincontreras]

stevekouts01 this is meant for CGI animations, not games. thus would take up a lot of resources in a game anyone but I could be done probably if thats the main focus line in nvidias flex demo

[@lbarthe]

If you want to see the recent advances around the implicit skinning, follow us on Facebook : facebook.com/implicit.skinning/

[@NameUserOf]

One would hope that Blender devs would implement it(as well as onion skinning, motion trail) but they never care for anything other than Cycles, sculpting and modeling tools. Everything else in a package gets an ugly kid treatment =(

[@Teturarsyra]

In their defense Blender did show some interest torwards this method but it's difficult for them to find somedoby to do it (it's a lot of work) and we released our research code only last summer. Also I think it's logical people working for free want to develop the thing they find interesting. But I'm sure they listen to their comunity and if really more people want to see this kind of features and voice their expectations it would motivate developers and we may see some google summer of code on this topic :)

[@RiorXD]

you can just do it through shape keys its a bit extra work but if you want results without using another program go for it

[@Themindforest]

+Teturarsyra I don't think there is a single person in the blender community who has worked on a character that wouldn't be absolutely thrilled with this being added in. I sure hope that blender devs find someone to take this on.

[@dejayrezme8617]

+Ato Mix Well even if you can't program you could 1) start a project and collect donations for this feature 2) find an engineer who can implement this 3) hire and pay him to do it.

[@LoffysDomain]

2:45 cell intersect witin cells intersect

[@bloomingpluto7351]

2:10 that is soooo me

[@jamil1985]

For Maya?

[@Invisibl3GuY]

Is it possible to get this Plugin for Softimage XSI any day?

[@Teturarsyra]

sofimage development was discontinued :( www.autodesk.com/products/softimage/overview

[@Invisibl3GuY]

I know, but maybe there is the possibility to get it even without the official autodesk support. The future for this tool is the community and its support.

[@kindkind4813]

where script?

[@khkgkgkjgkjh6647]

Please share code.