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Design, transformation and animation of human faces

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Abstract

Creation of new human faces for synthetic actors is a tedious and painful task. The situation may be improved by introducing tools for the creation. Two approaches are discussed in this paper: modification and edition of an existing synthetic actor using local transformations; generation of new synthetic actors obtained by interpolation between two existing actors; creation of a synthetic actor by composition of different parts. This paper also describes the methods used in the facial animation of synthetic actors who change their personalities from one person to another. This means that our purpose is to transform one character into another, and also to transform the animation at the same time. The interpolation must be at several levels: the shape level, the parameter level, the expression level and the script level. For the animation, we introduce three levels of inbetweens: inbetween parameters, inbetween expressions and inbetween scripts. The method has been completely implemented and integrated into the Human Factory software.

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Magnenat-Thalmann, N., Minh, H.T., de Angelis, M. et al. Design, transformation and animation of human faces. The Visual Computer 5, 32–39 (1989). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01901479

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