US Patent 7515155 Statistical dynamic modeling method and apparatus

A method for animating soft body characters has a preparation phase followed by an animation phase. In the preparation phase, the skin deformation of the character model is determined for a set of basis poses. The skin deformation from posing is compactly represented in terms of the set of basis poses. In the animation phase, the set of basis poses and the skin mode response are used to create a final posed character. A desired character pose is projected onto the basis set to determine a set of basis weights. The basis weights are applied to the set of skin responses to create a skin pose response, and the skin pose responses is projected onto the basis set to create the posed character model.