“Visualization of bone weights” by Loviscach

This work presents a set of visual helpers that aid in the editing of  smooth skinning (a.k.a. skeleton subspace deformation), see Fig- ure 1. These visualizations can easily be integrated with standard  3D software to leverage the skills of trained animators, in contrast to disruptive solutions such as [Mohr et al. 2003]. For smooth skinning, every vertex is equipped with weights that control the influence of the bones. Current 3D software allows to paint bone weights onto the mesh’s surface. It displays the weights for one single bone at a time or it applies a different color to every bone and blends these colors appropriately. Even in the latter case, the ratio of the weights, which is the most important quantity, is hard to read off. For instance, it’s not intuitively clear which color results from a 30 : 70 mix of blue and yellow. Furthermore, some software does not immediately adjust the painted weights to sum to one for every vertex. In the latter case, vertices may be influenced equally, even though they are displayed with different colors.  

1. Loviscach, J. 2006. Wrinkling coarse meshes on the GPU. Computer Graphics Forum 25, 3, in press.
2. Mohr, A., Tokheim, L., and Gleicher, M. 2003. Direct manipulation of interactive character skins. In SI3D ’03: Proceedings of the 2003 symposium on Interactive 3D graphics, 27–30.