Rigging & skinning.

Thoughts

• Having went through a lot of weight painting in an animation class last semester, the neural weight inference paper was very impressive. Particularly for clothes - while their bone structure can be relatively straightforward, getting it to transform and flow as well as they achieved is quite difficult.
• Linear blend skinning is straightforward; just blend all the transforms together.
• Dual quaternion skinning was more interesting, although we didn’t go through the dual math in detail. Anyway, the dual idea of ajoining a new primitive that squares to zero made a lot of sense for representing translations.
• Similarly, discussion of quaternion interpolation algorithms was interesting; I’ve played around with both slerp & normalized lerp, as well as full quaternion splines.
• Hadn’t heard of cage-based animation before, so that was cool. It seemed more of a more intuitive interface to specifying bone poses via synchronization than a fundamental technique, though.