Enhanced Dual Quaternion Skinning for Production Use

Dual Quaternion Skinning (DQS) is an advanced rigging technique that binds a mesh to skeletal joints. Unlike the popular alternative, Linear Blend Skinning (LBS), DQS avoids the undesirable “candy-wrapper effect” and effectively simulates volume preservation. DQS is a powerful technique, but to get desirable results, it must be extended to meet the needs of production environments, and is therefore not a simple drop-in replacement for LBS. This paper presents an extension to DQS that successfully met the rigging requirements of Disney’s feature Frozen. In particular, DQS is configured with LBS to handle non-rigid transformations, hierarchies of differing joints, and arbitrary support joints.