Particle-Oriented Bounding Box Skeletal Animation in real-time applications

Sammanfattning: Background. Skeletal animation is a technique used for displaying animated movement that uses bones in a hierarchy to get a structure; these bones are transformed based on their parent bones. Vertices in a mesh are connected to one or more bones with a weight, and the vertices will move based on the bone transformation, creating an animation. Objectives. In this study, a technique called "Particle-Oriented Bounding Box Skeletal Animation", (POBBSA) is proposed. Tests were conducted with the aim of comparing traditional skeletal animation and POBBSA based on performance and quality. With the primary aim of determining if the POBBSA technique is a solution for displaying suspended sediment-based characters. Methods. The two animation approaches were implemented with the intention to conduct performance tests based on memory usage and frames per second and quality tests based on feedback from a survey. The POBBSA will differ in its way of using oriented bounding boxes and particles with a certain style of movement. Results. The POBBSA approach needs more computational power to run than traditional skeletal animation, but its memory consumption can also be lower than traditional skeletal animation. The results from the survey were mostly positive, but artifacted particles appearing on the character were also mentioned by multiple survey participants. Conclusions. Performance-wise, the POBBSA is slower than traditional skeletal animation but has a slight advantage in memory usage. When comparing POBBSA and skeletal animation in terms of quality, it appears that for the current style, POBBSA works best for cuboid characters to avoid the artifacted particles that occur in complicated models.