Sketching-based skeleton generation

Articulated character animation can be performed by manually creating and rigging a skeleton into an unfolded 3D object. Such tasks are not trivial as it requires a substantial amount of training and practices. Although methods have been proposed to help automatic extraction of skeleton structure, they may not guarantee that the resulting skeleton can help produce desired animations according to user intention. In this paper, we present a sketching-based skeleton generation method suitable for use in the mobile environment. This method takes user sketching as an input, and based on the mesh segmentation result of a 3D object, it estimates a skeleton for articulated character animation. Results show that our method can produce better skeletons in terms of joint positions and topological structure. © 2010 IEEE.