Pose-space animation and transfer of facial details

Abstract

This paper presents a novel method for real-time animation of highly-detailed facial expressions based on a multi-scale decomposition of facial geometry into large-scale motion and fine-scale details, such as expression wrinkles. Our hybrid animation is tailored to the specific characteristics of large- and fine-scale facial deformations: Large-scale deformations are computed with a fast linear shell model, which is intuitively and accurately controlled through a sparse set of motion-capture markers or user-defined handle points. Fine-scale facial details are incorporated using a novel pose-space deformation technique, which learns the correspondence of sparse measurements of skin strain to wrinkle formation from a small set of example poses. Our hybrid method features real-time animation of highly-detailed faces with realistic wrinkle formation, and allows both large-scale deformations and fine-scale wrinkles to be edited intuitively. Furthermore, our pose-space representation enables the transfer of facial details to novel expressions or other facial models.