Skinned Motion Retargeting with Residual Perception of Motion Semantics & Geometry
This work addresses motion retargeting for character animation, an incremental improvement focusing on better handling of skeleton and geometry differences.
The paper tackles motion retargeting by proposing a Residual RETargeting network (R2ET) with skeleton-aware and shape-aware modules to adjust source motions for target skeletons and shapes, achieving state-of-the-art performance on the Mixamo dataset with improved balance in preserving motion semantics and reducing interpenetration and contact-missing.
A good motion retargeting cannot be reached without reasonable consideration of source-target differences on both the skeleton and shape geometry levels. In this work, we propose a novel Residual RETargeting network (R2ET) structure, which relies on two neural modification modules, to adjust the source motions to fit the target skeletons and shapes progressively. In particular, a skeleton-aware module is introduced to preserve the source motion semantics. A shape-aware module is designed to perceive the geometries of target characters to reduce interpenetration and contact-missing. Driven by our explored distance-based losses that explicitly model the motion semantics and geometry, these two modules can learn residual motion modifications on the source motion to generate plausible retargeted motion in a single inference without post-processing. To balance these two modifications, we further present a balancing gate to conduct linear interpolation between them. Extensive experiments on the public dataset Mixamo demonstrate that our R2ET achieves the state-of-the-art performance, and provides a good balance between the preservation of motion semantics as well as the attenuation of interpenetration and contact-missing. Code is available at https://github.com/Kebii/R2ET.