Interactive Facial Animation: Enhancing Facial Rigs With Real-Time Shell And Contact Simulation

How to read this

Category

Method: real-time physics augmentation of facial rigs

Contributions

• Augments an existing facial rig with real-time thin-shell simulation and contact handling, with no anatomical priors or additional artist intervention.
• Adds physically plausible skin dynamics and self-contact at the lips and eyelids, layered over the rig.
• Runs interactively on consumer hardware and generalizes across realistic, stylized and fantastical characters.

Context

Builds on physics-based face modeling such as Phace, but trades anatomical priors for a lightweight shell-plus-contact layer on top of any existing rig.Builds on: Phace: Physics-based Face Modeling and Animation

Correctness

Demonstrated to add plausible dynamics and self-contact interactively across character styles; the no-anatomy, shell-based approximation is the key assumption, so a reader should keep in mind it adds surface dynamics rather than true volumetric tissue simulation.

Clarity

Accessible motivation; a first pass conveys what it adds and where, do a second pass for the shell and contact formulation.

How to read it

Focus on how the shell and contact model couples to an arbitrary rig and the real-time budget; second pass the contact handling if you care about lips/eyelids fidelity.