Jing Ma, Jin Wang, Jituo Li et al.
Skeleton creation is an important phase in the character animation pipeline. However, handcrafting skeleton takes extensive labor time and domain knowledge. Automatic skeletonization provides a solution. However, most of the current approaches are far from real-time and lack the flexibility to control the skeleton complexity. In this paper, we present an efficient skeletonization method, which can be seamlessly integrated into the sketch-based modeling process in real-time. The method contains three steps: local sub-skeleton extraction; sub-skeleton connection; and global skeleton refinement. Firstly, the local skeleton is extracted from the processed polygon stroke and forms a subpart along with the sub-mesh. Then, local sub-skeletons are connected according to the intersecting relationships and the modeling sequence of subparts. Lastly, a global refinement method is proposed to give users coarse-to-fine control on the connected skeleton. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on a variety of examples created by both novices and professionals.