Frankenrigs: Building Character Rigs from Multiple Sources

We present a new rigging and skinning method which uses a database of partial rigs extracted from a set of source characters. Given a target mesh and a set of joint locations, our system can automatically scan through the database to find the best-fitting body parts, tailor them to match the target mesh, and transfer their skinning information onto the new character. For the cases where our automatic procedure fails, we provide an intuitive set of tools to fix the problems. When used fully automatically, the system can generate results of much higher quality than a standard smooth bind, and with some user interaction, it can create rigs approaching the quality of artist-created manual rigs in a small fraction of the time.