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Performance-Driven Facial Animation
Drives a digital face directly from tracked human performance, the founding paper of performance capture.
Abstract
As computer graphics technique rises to the challenge of rendering lifelike performers, more lifelike performance is required. The techniques used to animate robots, arthropods, and suits of armor, have been extended to flexible surfaces of fur and flesh. Physical models of muscle and skin have been devised. But more complex databases and sophisticated physical modeling do not directly address the performance problem. The gestures and expressions of a human actor are not the solution to a dynamic system. This paper describes a means of acquiring the expressions of real faces, and applying them to computer-generated faces. Such an "electronic mask" offers a means for the traditional talents of actors to be flexibly incorporated in digital animations. Efforts in a similar spirit have resulted in servo-controlled "animatrons," high-technology puppets, and CG puppetry [1]. The manner in which the skills of actors and puppetteers as well as animators are accommodated in such systems may point the way for a more general incorporation of human nuance into our emerging computer media.The ensuing description is divided into two major subjects: the construction of a highly-resoved human head model with photographic texture mapping, and the concept demonstration of a system to animate this model by tracking and applying the expressions of a human performer.
How to read this
- Category
- Method: performance-driven facial animation (founding performance-capture paper)
- Contributions
- A means of acquiring the expressions of real human faces and applying them to computer-generated faces
- An 'electronic mask' that lets an actor's gestures and expressions drive a digital face
- Construction of a highly resolved human head model to receive the captured performance
- Context
- Builds on Parke's parametric face model (A Parametric Model for Human Faces, 1974) and shifts from synthesizing expressions to capturing them from a live performer.Builds on: A Parametric Model for Human Faces
- Correctness
- Frames performance, not dynamic simulation, as the source of lifelike expression and demonstrates transfer of tracked faces onto CG heads; a reader should note it is an early proof of concept whose fidelity is bounded by the era's tracking and capture setup.
- Clarity
- Very readable and motivational; a first pass conveys the founding idea, a second pass repays the acquisition and head-construction details.
- How to read it
- Read as the origin of performance capture: focus on the acquisition-and-retargeting pipeline and the 'electronic mask' framing; a second pass on the capture and head-model construction pays off if you work in facial capture.
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