Facial Modeling and Animation

In this course we present an overview of the concepts and current techniques in facial modeling and animation. We introduce this research area by its history and applications. As a necessary prerequisite for facial modeling, data acquisition is discussed in detail. We describe basic concepts of facial animation and present different approaches including parametric models, performance-, physics-, and learning-based methods. State-of-the-art techniques such as muscle-based facial animation, massspring networks for skin models, and morphable models are part of these approaches. We furthermore discuss texturing of head models and rendering of skin, addressing problems related to texture synthesis and bump mapping with graphics hardware. Typical applications for facial modeling and animation such as medical and forensic applications (craniofacial surgery simulation, facial reconstruction from skull data, virtual aging) and animation techniques for movie production (case study of The Matrix sequels) are presented and explained.