ProcDef: Local-to-global Deformation for Skeleton-free Character Animation

Animations of characters with flexible bodies such as jellyfish, snails, and, hearts are difficult to design using traditional skeleton-based approaches. A standard approach is keyframing, but adjusting the shape of the flexible body for each key frame is tedious. In addition, the character cannot dynamically adjust its motion to respond to the environment or user input. This paper introduces a new procedural deformation framework (ProcDef) for designing and driving animations of such flexible objects. Our approach is to synthesize global motions procedurally by integrating local deformations. ProcDef provides an efficient design scheme for local deformation patterns; the user can control the orientation and magnitude of local deformations as well as the propagation of deformation signals by specifying line charts and volumetric fields. We also present a fast and robust deformation algorithm based on shape-matching dynamics and show some example animations to illustrate the feasibility of our framework.