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Easy Rigging of Face by Automatic Registration and Transfer of Skinning Parameters
Ludovic Dutreve, Alexandre Meyer, Veronica Orvalho, Saida Bouakaz
Transfers the feature points and their point-vertex weights from an already rigged reference face onto a new mesh with radial basis functions and automatic registration, so nobody marks correspondences by hand.
Abstract
Preparing a facial mesh to be animated requires a laborious manual rigging process. The rig specifies how the input animation data deforms the surface and allows artists to manipulate a character. We present a method that automatically rigs a facial mesh based on Radial Basis Functions and linear blend skinning approach. Our approach transfers the skinning parameters (feature points and their envelopes, ie. point-vertex weights), of a reference facial mesh (source) already rigged, to the chosen facial mesh (target) by computing an automatic registration between the two meshes. There is no need to manually mark the correspondence between the source and target mesh. As a result, inexperienced artists can automatically rig facial meshes and start right away animating their 3D characters, driven for instance by motion capture data.
How to read this
- Category
- Method paper on automatic facial rigging by skinning transfer, from the Lyon LIRIS group with Orvalho.
- Contributions
- An automatic rig transfer that moves feature points and their point-vertex weights from an already rigged reference face to a new mesh.
- Radial basis functions plus linear blend skinning as the deformation machinery, both cheap and already in every DCC package.
- Automatic registration between source and target, so the user never marks corresponding landmarks by hand.
- A stated target of letting inexperienced artists drive a fresh face with motion capture data straight away.
- Context
- Descends from orvalho-rig-transfer-2008 and shares its goal of authoring a rig once and reusing it. The difference is what gets transferred: Orvalho moves an anatomical rig with muscles and a skeleton, while this paper moves the far simpler payload of skinning weights and feature points, which is why it lands in real pipelines more easily.Builds on: Transferring the Rig and Animations from a Character to Different Face Models
- Correctness
- Linear blend skinning is the honest limit here. Whatever the reference rig could not express, the target will not express either, and the familiar candy wrapper artefacts come along with the method. The registration is automatic, which means its failure mode is silent: a target face far from the source in topology or proportion will still produce weights, just bad ones. Look for how much topological variation the examples actually cover.
- Clarity
- Clear and practical, written like something you could implement in an afternoon. The pipeline is laid out step by step and the notation stays light.
- How to read it
- First pass: abstract, pipeline figure, results. Second pass: the registration step and the weight transfer, which are the two places the method can go wrong. Third pass: only if you plan to implement it, in which case the RBF setup is the part worth copying out. The free PDF on HAL is the version to read.
Built upon by
Nothing yet.
Related work
- Transferring a Labeled Generic Rig to Animate Face Models 2006 / AMDO
- Creating Infinite Characters From a Single Template: How Automation May Give Super Powers to 3D Artists 2024 / SIGGRAPH
- Reusable Facial Rigging and Animation: Create Once, Use Many 2007 / PhD Thesis
- Smooth Contact-Aware Facial Blendshapes Transfer 2013 / DigiPro
Keywords
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