Mesh Animation Compression using Skinning and Multi-chart Displacement Texture

16th International Joint Conference on Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications (VISIGRAPP 2021)

Andrej Fúsek, Adam Riečický, Martin Stuchlík, Martin Madaras

Abstract

Realistic animations of 3D models are currently very complex, and to stream them over a network in real-time, it is necessary to use compression. Currently, many different methods can be used. Some of them use skeleton transformation as an approximation of the animation, others use remeshing for decreasing mesh complexity. In this paper, a novel method of 3D animation compression is presented. It is based on reconstructing a 3D mesh from a 2D displacement texture and subsequent skeletal skinning enhanced by a surface tuning. The tuning is performed by displacing the skinned vertices according to high-frequency details encoded in a Differential Texture since the output of the skinning is just an approximation of the original animation. Skinning weights are encoded in another new texture type - Skinning Map. In each frame of the streaming animation, just a new skeleton pose and the Differential Texture are needed to be sent. The proposed method has a high compression ratio for various animations because the pose is a small data structure and the Differential Texture contains just high-frequency details and on top of that, it can be compressed as video. Furthermore, differences between original and reconstructed animation are minimal, as evidenced by visual and numerical comparisons.