Mimicing 3D transformations of emotional stylised animation with minimal 2D input

In this paper we introduce a novel approach to assist a graphical artist throughout the creation of traditional facial animation. We focus on eliminating the time-consuming process of drawing all the emotions of a character, which has to be seen from different viewpoints. Furthermore, we aim at preserving the animator's freedom of expressing the artistic style he is bearing in mind.To establish these goals, we introduce the concept of facial emotion channels, of which each represents a facial part expressing an emotion. Furthermore, we present a novel approach through which an emotionally meaningful 2D facial expression from one point of view can be created from a reference expression from another point of view. The provided solution is easy to use and empowers a much quicker cartoon production, without hampering the animation artists' creativity.

[1]  Peter-Pike J. Sloan,et al.  Artist‐Directed Inverse‐Kinematics Using Radial Basis Function Interpolation , 2001, Comput. Graph. Forum.

[2]  E. Catmull,et al.  Recursively generated B-spline surfaces on arbitrary topological meshes , 1978 .

[3]  Kristinn R. Thrisson ToonFace: A System for Creating and Animating Interactive Cartoon Faces , 1996 .

[4]  Frank Van Reeth,et al.  Employing Approximate 3D Models to Enrich Traditional Computer Assisted Animation , 2002, CA.

[5]  Christoph Bregler,et al.  Turning to the masters: motion capturing cartoons , 2002, ACM Trans. Graph..

[6]  Frederick I. Parke,et al.  Computer gernerated animation of faces , 1998 .

[7]  Philip J. Willis,et al.  Computer Assisted Animation: 2D or not 2D? , 1994, Comput. J..

[8]  Daniel Thalmann,et al.  Simulation of Facial Muscle Actions Based on Rational Free Form Deformations , 1992, Comput. Graph. Forum.

[9]  Frank Van Reeth,et al.  Automatic in-betweening in computer assisted animation by exploiting 2.5D modelling techniques , 2001, Proceedings Computer Animation 2001. Fourteenth Conference on Computer Animation (Cat. No.01TH8596).

[10]  Zsófia Ruttkay,et al.  FESINC : Facial Expression Sculpturing with INterval Constraints , 2001 .

[11]  Han Noot,et al.  Animated CharToon faces , 2000, NPAR '00.

[12]  Alexander Kort,et al.  Computer Aided , 2022 .

[13]  Ming Ouhyoung,et al.  Realistic 3D facial animation parameters from mirror-reflected multi-view video , 2001, Proceedings Computer Animation 2001. Fourteenth Conference on Computer Animation (Cat. No.01TH8596).

[14]  Richard Williams,et al.  The Animator's Survival Kit , 2001 .

[15]  Frederick I. Parke,et al.  Computer generated animation of faces , 1972, ACM Annual Conference.

[16]  Frank Van Reeth,et al.  A Multi-Level Sketching Tool for "Pencil-and-Paper" Animation , 2002 .

[17]  Paul Rademacher,et al.  View-dependent geometry , 1999, SIGGRAPH.

[18]  Ulrich Neumann,et al.  CoArt: coarticulation region analysis for control of 2D characters , 2002, Proceedings of Computer Animation 2002 (CA 2002).

[19]  Jun-yong Noh,et al.  A Survey of Facial Modeling and Animation Techniques , 2001 .

[20]  Michael Gleicher,et al.  Retargetting motion to new characters , 1998, SIGGRAPH.

[21]  Norman I. Badler,et al.  Animating facial expressions , 1981, SIGGRAPH '81.