Hierarchical Spherical Cross‐Parameterization for Deforming Characters

Abstract The demand for immersive technology and realistic virtual environments has created a need for automated solutions to generate characters with morphological variations. However, existing approaches either rely on manual labour or oversimplify the problem by limiting it to static meshes or deformation transfers without shape morphing. In this paper, we propose a new cross‐parameterization approach that semi‐automates the generation of morphologically diverse characters with synthesized articulations and animations. The main contribution of this work is that our approach parameterizes deforming characters into a novel hierarchical multi‐sphere domain, while considering the attributes of mesh topology, deformation and animation. With such a multi‐sphere domain, our approach minimizes parametric distortion rates, enhances the bijectivity of parameterization and aligns deforming feature correspondences. The alignment process we propose allows users to focus only on major joint pairs, which is much simpler and more intuitive than the existing alignment solutions that involve a manual process of identifying feature points on mesh surfaces. Compared to recent works, our approach achieves high‐quality results in the applications of 3D morphing, texture transfer, character synthesis and deformation transfer.