Miguel A. Otaduy: Research

Facial Animation

The face gathers the foremost relevant visual characteristics of human identity and expression. Therefore, the quest for realistic computer graphics has devoted a large amount of resources to facial animation. Among the various complex aspects of the face, its tissue undergoes highly nonlinear skin bulging and wrinlking effects under expressive motion.

One way to realistically model facial wrinkles is to capture those wrinkles from an actor's performance. However, this is not exempt of difficulties, due to the fine scale of wrinkles. The decomposition of facial motion into large and fine scale allows for detailed capture and modeling of wrinkles through nonlinear optimization approaches [→]. Once several expressions of an actor are captured, it is possible to model high-resolution detailed facial motion in real-time by interpolating the data from the pre-captured expressions [→].

But these modeling approaches do not allow external interaction with a facial model. Reaction to effects such as contact requires a mechanical model of facial tissue, which imposes in turn additional complications, due to its nonlinearity and heterogeneity. These complications can be circumvented by capturing as a preprocess simple material parameters under various deformations, and then interpolating at run-time the captured parameters [→].

Collaborators: Bernd Bickel (ETH Zurich) [→], Markus Gross (ETH Zurich) [→], Wojciech Matusik (Adobe) [→], Hanspeter Pfister (Harvard) [→], Mario Botsch (Bielefeld) [→].

Last modified June 10, 2009