Pose-weight Interpolation: a Lateral Approach to Pose-based Deformations

Sculpting character deformations that stay on-model for an arbitrary pose is a non-trivial task. Example based methods are desirable, depending on how few sculpted examples they require. After experimenting with various methods, we find the results are lacking from an artistic point of view. The core problem comes down to a matter of Pose-weight Interpolation, for which we present a novel, artist-friendly solution, Constrained Weight Smoothing. CWS computes Pose-weights on an n-dimensional mesh in pose-space such that weights for an arbitrary pose can be evaluated in O(1) time.