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

Preparing a facial mesh to be animated requires a laborious manual rigging process. The rig specifies how the input animation data deforms the surface and allows artists to manipulate a character.We present amethod that automatically rigs a facialmesh based on Radial Basis Functions (RBF) and linear blend skinning approach. Our approach transfers the skinning parameters (feature points and their envelopes, ie. pointvertex weights), of a reference facial mesh (source) - already rigged - to the chosen facial mesh (target) by computing an automatic registration between the two meshes. There is no need to manually mark the correspondence between the source and target mesh. As a result, inexperienced artists can automatically rig facial meshes and start right away animating their 3D characters, driven for instance by motion capture data.

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