SkinCells: Sparse Skinning using Voronoi Cells
Egor Larionov, Igor Santesteban, Hsiao-yu Chen, Gene Lin, Philipp Herholz, Ryan Goldade, Ladislav Kavan, Doug Roble, Tuur Stuyck
For decades, real-time skinning has been the cornerstone of character animation in visual effects and games. Despite its importance, the creation of animatable digital assets remains a labor-intensive manual process. Existing automated tools frequently struggle with intricate geometries, often necessitating significant manual refinement to reach production standards. We present a robust, fully automated method for generating high-quality skinning weights from a standard mesh and skeleton in a canonical A- or T-pose. Unlike traditional approaches, our framework offers direct sparsity controls to limit bone influences per vertex -- a critical requirement for maintaining performance in large-scale mobile environments. Furthermore, we address the challenge of Level-of-Detail (LoD) management by optimizing weights within a continuous spatial volume rather than on discrete vertices. This allows a single optimization pass to be applied seamlessly across multiple asset resolutions and variations. Central to our approach is a novel parameterized family of functions, we call SkinCells. We demonstrate that our method consistently produces stable, high-quality results even in complex scenarios where standard biharmonic weight computations fail.
| Paper | |
| Eurographics | Digital Library |
| Video | MP4 |
| arXiv | 2506.14714 |
BibTeX
@article{larionov2026skincells,
title = {
{SkinCells}: Sparse Skinning using Voronoi Cells
},
author = {
Larionov, Egor and
Santesteban, Igor and
Chen, Hsiao-yu and
Lin, Gene and
Herholz, Philipp and
Goldade, Ryan and
Kavan, Ladislav and
Roble, Doug and
Stuyck, Tuur
},
editor = {
Masia, Belen and
Thies, Justus
},
journal = {Computer Graphics Forum},
volume = {45},
number = {2},
issn = {1467-8659},
pages = {12},
year = {2026},
doi = {10.1111/cgf.70381},
url = {https://diglib.eg.org/handle/10.1111/cgf70381},
keywords = {
Character animation,
Cloth animation,
Skinning weights,
Level-of-detail,
Animation
},
publisher = {The Eurographics Association and John Wiley \& Sons Ltd.}
}