3D Character Animation: A Brief Review

Abstract

The Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) tech -nologies provide many contents that we can barely experience in reality. Further, the developments in performance of comput-er and GPU are based on putting virtual environment into our reality efficiently. The core technologies in developing contents of AR and VR are 3D character modeling and 3D character ani -mation. These are used in various areas such as 3D film, game industry, Physics, Medical simulation and Educational contents. In this review, we discuss the method of animating contents in the virtual reality. There are two topics of 3D character animation, namely, Fa-cial animation and Body animation. Facial animation implies the representation of natural facial expressions. There are two methods of producing this type of animation. One is the Geom-etry-based approach which is based on control point in 3D char-acter face mesh and the other is Blend shape model-based ap-proach which utilizes 3D facial expression template blending. The tree-structured skeleton is usually used for animating body motion. In addition, to achieve more realistic character move-ments, not only physics but also non-rigid deformation of skin or clothes are adopted. In this paper, we discuss Geometry- and Blend shape model-based of facial animation as well as Skeleton- and Physics-based of body animation.