Easy Rigging of Face by Automatic Registration and Transfer of Skinning Parameters

International audiencePreparing a facial mesh to be animated requires a laborious manualrigging process. The rig specifies how the input animation datadeforms the surface and allows artists to manipulate a character.We present a method that automatically rigs a facial mesh based onRadial Basis Functions and linear blend skinning approach.Our approach transfers the skinning parameters (feature points andtheir envelopes, ie. point-vertex weights),of a reference facial mesh (source) - already rigged - tothe chosen facial mesh (target) by computing an automaticregistration between the two meshes.There is no need to manually mark the correspondence between thesource and target mesh.As a result, inexperienced artists can automatically rig facial meshes and startright away animating their 3D characters, driven for instanceby motion capture data

Dr. Inventor, Promoting Scientific Creativity by Utilising Web-based Research Objects, FP7

Scientific creativity and innovation represent the beating heart of European growth at a time of rapid technological change. Dr Inventor is built on the vision that technologies have great potential to supplement human ingenuity in science by overcoming the limitations that people suffer in pursuing scientific discovery. It presents an original system that will provide inspiration for scientific creativity by utilising the rich presence of web-based research resources. Dr Inventor will act as a personal research assistant, utilising machine-empowered search and computation to bring researchers extended perspectives for scientific innovation by informing them of a broad spectrum of relevant research concepts and approaches, by assessing the novelty of research ideas, and by offering suggestions of new concepts and workflows with unexpected features for new scientific discovery. Dr Inventor is an attempt to understand the potential of technology in the scientific creative process within current technology limitations. It represents a sound balance between scientific insight into individual scientific creative processes and technical implementation using innovative technologies in information extraction, document summarization, semantics and visual analytics. The outcomes will be integrated into a web-based system that will allow evaluation in a selected research area under real-world settings with carefully designed metrics, benchmarks and baseline for creative performance, leading to tangible measurements on the performance of the technologies in enhancing human creativity and a blueprint for future technologies in computational creativity. Dr Inventor has huge implications for scientific innovation in Europe, as it has the potential to change the way in which scientific research is undertaken. The acceptance of the system by general research communities will open opportunities for many industrial sectors, leading to reinforced leadership of European industry

Building highly realistic facial modeling and animation: a survey

This paper provides a comprehensive survey on the techniques for human facial modeling and animation. The survey is carried out from two different perspectives: facial modeling, which concerns how to produce 3D face models, and facial animation, which regards how to synthesize dynamic facial expressions. To generate an individual face model, we can either perform individualization of a generic model or combine face models from an existing face collection. With respect to facial animation, we have further categorized the techniques into simulation-based, performance-driven and shape blend-based approaches. The strength and weakness of these techniques within each category are discussed, alongside with the applications of these techniques to various exploitations. In addition, a brief historical review of the technique evolution is provided. Limitations and future trend are discussed. Conclusions are drawn at the end of the paper