playcanvas / playcanvas/engine

Feature Request - Dual Quaternion Skinning

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#3,643 3 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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area: animation area: graphics enhancement
Dominant language
JavaScript
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Description

We are a team, doing research on the animation pipeline for the next prototype.
This time, we are doing some muscle'y strong guys. And during some of my rigging and testing, I found that, when twisting arms espescially, these buffed guys almost "fall apart", due to "candy wrapper" issues arising, when twisting limbs.

Muscles basically "dissapear", and arms get much thinner. The workaround for now, is adding some twistbones (not too many of course), but it would be awesome to get an idea of where you guys are going (if at all) with the idea of adding Dual quaternion skinning - to minimize wolume-shrinking as a reault of twisting limbs on characters.

Here's an explanation of the issue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4e_ToPH-I5o

Here's an example of twisting the arm of this strong guy (extra twistbones help remove part of the candy wrapper issue).
Look at the end of the gif - here, you can see how dual quaternion skinning helps keep more of the musclevolume.

GIF 29-10-2021 13 53 06

Best, Jesper Colding

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First steps

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Research direction

The issue names no file, test, or entry point. Start by locating the engine's animation and skinning pipeline and compare the current behavior with the linked dual-quaternion explanation and example. Done would require an agreed implementation scope plus evidence that twisting limbs preserves muscle volume without relying on extra twistbones.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
javascript
Domain
computer-graphics, game-dev
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
20/100

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