A step towards universal facial animation via volume morphing

As more and more of the virtual world inside our computers imitates real life, the creation of anthropomorphic agents is attracting attention. In the very near future, computer generated faces will be conversing with us via our personal computers, video phones and ATM machines. Although advances have been made in the field of computer facial animation, universal animation, which aims to animate any given computer face model automatically, has yet to be fully realized. This paper reports on an approach towards universal animation on polygonal 3-D face models with near-real time performance speed on personal computers. Platt's facial model (1985) is used as a generic base for acquiring muscle information and a 3-D volume morphing technique is used to obtain different faces for animation. Transferring the muscle information on a generic face to other face models has been accomplished. New face models can be animated without the tedious process of muscle attachment which also requires a knowledge of facial anatomy.