Accurate and efficient lighting for skinned models

In the context of real‐time, GPU‐based rendering of animated skinned meshes, we propose a new algorithm to compute surface normals with minimal overhead both in terms of the memory footprint and the required per‐vertex operations. By accounting for the variation of the skinning weights over the surface, we achieve a higher visual quality compared to the standard approximation ubiquitously used in video‐game engines and other real‐time applications. Our method supports Linear Blend Skinning and Dual Quaternion Skinning. We demonstrate the advantages of our technique on a variety of datasets and provide a complete open‐source implementation, including GLSL shaders.