HMC: Hierarchical Mesh Coarsening for Skeleton-free Motion Retargeting
This addresses motion retargeting for 3D character animation, offering a more effective solution for preserving local motions, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing mesh-based approaches.
The paper tackles the problem of skeleton-free motion retargeting between high-resolution meshes, which often fails to preserve local-part motions, by proposing a hierarchical mesh coarsening method that improves motion transfer and yields a 25% average improvement in point-wise mesh euclidean distance compared to state-of-the-art methods.
We present a simple yet effective method for skeleton-free motion retargeting. Previous methods transfer motion between high-resolution meshes, failing to preserve the inherent local-part motions in the mesh. Addressing this issue, our proposed method learns the correspondence in a coarse-to-fine fashion by integrating the retargeting process with a mesh-coarsening pipeline. First, we propose a mesh-coarsening module that coarsens the mesh representations for better motion transfer. This module improves the ability to handle small-part motion and preserves the local motion interdependence between neighboring mesh vertices. Furthermore, we leverage a hierarchical refinement procedure to complement missing mesh details by gradually improving the low-resolution mesh output with a higher-resolution one. We evaluate our method on several well-known 3D character datasets, and it yields an average improvement of 25% on point-wise mesh euclidean distance (PMD) against the start-of-art method. Moreover, our qualitative results show that our method is significantly helpful in preserving the moving consistency of different body parts on the target character due to disentangling body-part structures and mesh details in a hierarchical way.