An art-directed wrinkle system for CG character clothing and skin

We present a kinematic system for creating art-directed clothing and skin wrinkles on CG characters used in the production of computer-animated feature films. This system employs a curve-based method for generating wrinkles on reference poses, which are incorporated into a weighted matching algorithm that generates wrinkle deformations on an animated character. An artist creates wrinkle patterns in an interactive application that is intuitive to use and accommodates iterative art direction. The algorithm for evaluating wrinkles measures the local stress of a surface and creates weights that are used to interpolate between the reference wrinkle patterns during movement. We discuss various production pipeline issues, such as retargeting wrinkle patterns between different costumes and characters. We extend the approach to achieve believable age wrinkles for character skin. Our system has been used successfully in the production of feature-length animated films.