Surface deformation over flexible joints using spline blending techniques

Skinning over a skeleton joint is the process of skin deformation based on joint transformation. Popular geometric skinning techniques include implicit linear blending and dual quaternions. Generalized expo-rational B-splines (GERBS) is a blending type spline construction where local functions at each knot are blended by Ck-smooth basis functions. A smooth skinning surface can be constructed over a transformable skeleton joint by combining various types of local surface constructions and applying local Hermite interpolation. Compared to traditional spline methods, increased flexibility and local control with respect to surface deformation can be achieved using the GERBS blending construction. We present a method using a blending-type spline surface for skinning over a flexible joint, where local geometry is individually adapted to achieve natural skin deformation based on skeleton transformations..