Dem Bones is an open source animation skinning application from EA’s research division SEED. The source code is available on GitHub under the BSD3 open source license.
Details from the EA news page:
The state-of-the-art skinning decomposition solution was introduced in the SIGGRAPH Asia 2012 technical paper “Smooth Skinning Decomposition with Rigid Bones” by Binh Le and Zhigang Deng. Since then, this method has been implemented in some animation tools for game production, including Hans Godard’s skinning converter, Autodesk Maya’s bake deformer, or SideFX Houdini’s skinning converter, to name a few. At EA, we also use this technique in our content pipeline quite successfully since 2015.
SEED is pleased to open source Dem Bones, a library for skinning decomposition, implemented by Binh Le, the creator of the method. Dem Bones offers a lot of refinements for better quality and faster performance compared to the original research paper. Dem Bones core library is C++ header-only solvers using Eigen and OpenMP. We also include a minimalist command line tool for Windows and MacOS that can import and export data from standard asset formats: FBX and Alembic. The library and command line tool provide core functions of skinning decomposition such as auto generation of joints, solving sparse, non-negative, affine skinning weights and solving rigid joint transformations. The package is ready to use in research and prototyping, or it can be integrated into the production pipeline with minimum effort.
You can learn more about the R&D team at EA on the SEED website. You can learn more about Dem Bones animation skinning and see it in action adding bones to a Blender project in the video below.