A simple footskate removal method for virtual reality applications

Footskate is a common problem encountered in interactive applications dealing with virtual character animations. It has proven difficult to fix without the use of complex numerical methods, which require expert skills for their implementations, along with a fair amount of user interaction to correct a motion. On the other hand, deformable bodies are being increasingly used in virtual reality (VR) applications, allowing users to customize their avatar as they wish. This introduces the need of adapting motions without any help from a designer, as a random user seldom has the skills required to drive the existing algorithms towards the right solution. In this paper, we present a simple method to remove footskate artifacts in VR applications. Unlike previous algorithms, our approach does not rely on the skeletal animation to perform the correction but rather on the skin. This ensures that the final foot planting really matches the virtual character’s motion. The changes are applied to the root joint of the skeleton only so that the resulting animation is as close as possible to the original one. Eventually, thanks to the simplicity of its formulation, it can be quickly and easily added to existing frameworks.