Towards Point-based Facial Movement Simulation

Abstract

Lifelike animated characters are hard to create and involve extensive manual effort during generation of the geometry, adding a rig to the model, and creating the actual movements of limbs and tissue. Blendshapes is the leading technique regarding facial animations. This very simple mathematical model can be computed efficiently, thus it is suited for real time visualization. On the other hand it is hard to control, requires a skilled animator, and is still very error prone. Point-based simulation techniques became increasingly popular in recent years for animation of elastic surfaces, but have barely been used for facial animation. We argue, that this kind of technique is much more suited for simulation and animation of the non-rigid deformations of facial tissue. We build our proposal on a meshless finite elements technique, which has already been used successfully for the elastic simulation of surface models in real time and describe extensions to the approach so it can be applied for facial animation.