Physical Face Cloning

How to read this

Category

Method / fabrication pipeline: cloning a face into animatronic skin

Contributions

• An end-to-end process to design, simulate, and fabricate synthetic silicone skin for an animatronic character matching a subject's face
• Measurement of the silicone's elastic properties plus performance capture of the target subject's facial expressions
• A neo-Hookean FEM physics-based optimization that jointly solves for skin thickness and robotic actuation parameters, validated by physically cloning a real face

Context

Combines facial performance capture with physically-based FEM simulation of soft tissue, applied to the fabrication/animatronics setting rather than pure on-screen rendering.

Correctness

Validated by actually fabricating an animatronic face via injection molding, which is strong evidence; the results are bounded by the neo-Hookean material model, the captured expression set, and the actuation hardware, so matching is approximate and constrained by what the physical base can actuate.

Clarity

Accessible as a pipeline narrative; a first pass conveys the design-simulate-fabricate loop, a second pass is needed for the FEM optimization formulation.

How to read it

First pass for the full pipeline and the joint thickness/actuation optimization idea; second pass on the neo-Hookean FEM and the optimization setup if you care about the physics or fabrication side.