Pose-independent simplification of articulated meshes

Methods for triangle mesh decimation are common; however, most existing techniques operate only on static geometry. In this paper, we present a view- and pose-independent method for the automatic simplification of skeletally articulated meshes. Such meshes have associated kinematic skeletons that are used to control their deformation, with the position of each vertex influenced by a linear combination of bone transformations. Our method extends the commonly-used quadric error metric by incorporating knowledge of potential poses into a probability function. We minimize the average error of the deforming mesh over all possible configurations, weighted by the probability. This is possible by transforming the quadrics from each configuration into a common coordinate system. Our simplification algorithm runs as a preprocess, and the resulting meshes can be seamlessly integrated into existing systems. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach for generating highly-simplified models while preserving necessary detail in deforming regions near joints.