Multilevel deformation model applied to hand simulation for virtual actors

Until now, real-time environments have focused on optimizing the speed of the display, mainly by managing various levels of details of the scene's objects. These approaches are generally aimed at virtual scenes with rigid objects. If we consider that objects can be deformed through time, another process has to be considered in the scene building pipeline: each object must be deformed prior to its display in a given frame. Similarly to other processes of the pipeline, the control of the display speed must be made by balancing between visual quality and time cost. This requires either to combine various deformable models, sorted by their cost in time, or to use a single deformable model able to work at various levels of details. Our purpose is to propose such a multilevel deformable model that we illustrate by its application to human hands simulation.