Efficient simulation of secondary motion in rig-space

Abstract

We present an efficient method for augmenting keyframed character animations with physically-simulated secondary motion. Our method achieves a performance improvement of one to two orders of magnitude over previous work without compromising on quality. This performance is based on a linearized formulation of rig-space dynamics that uses only rig parameters as degrees of freedom, a physics-based volumetric skinning method that allows our method to predict the motion of internal vertices solely from deformations of the surface, as well as a deferred Jacobian update scheme that drastically reduces the number of required rig evaluations. We demonstrate the performance of our method by comparing it to previous work and showcase its potential on a production-quality character rig.