Design, transformation and animation of human faces

Creation of new human faces for synthetic actors is a difficult task. The situation may be improved by introducing tools for the creation. Three approaches are discussed: 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. The authors also describe the methods used in the facial animation of synthetic actors who change their personalities from one person to another. The interpolation must be at several levels: shape level, parameter level, expression level and script level. For the animation, three levels of inbetweens are introduced: inbetween parameters, inbetween expressions and inbetween scripts. The method has been completely implemented and integrated into Human Factory software