### Summary


This paper presents a method for improving linear-blend skinning, addressing its common issues of shrinkage around bent joints and the "candy-wrapper" effect around rotated joints. They avoid these issues, which are caused by blending dissimilar transformations, by using reference poses and their skins to add additional joints that allow them to avoid dissimilar blends.


### Methods Used

* Using high-end skinning software (e.g. Maya), create a skin. This works well for artists, since they are allowed to use a familiar environment.
* Take a set of poses which exercise the joints fully (but that don't necessarily correspond to realistic movement).
* Sample regularly between these poses, which can be done using a script, and use those samples to determine an ideal set of joints and their influenced vertices by solving a least-squares problem.


### Key Ideas

* Linear-blend skinning is fast, and very memory compact. But it doesn't produce very good results in certain situations.
* By avoiding those situations, using a small number of well-placed joints, they can take advantage of the linear-blend skinning's speed, while still producing visually acceptable results.