Facial Animation Research
Summer 2000
I was accepted on a student scheme to be funded for research within the Department of Computer Science during the Summer of 2000. As part of this project, I helped to develop a reasoning, expressive, animated virtual assistant. I developed a muscle-based facial animation technique allowing lip-synchronisation with text-to-speech output and facial expressions. I was able to carry on this work as a part of my fourth-year project into augmented reality.
Sample screen-shots of the completed muscle-based model in action
Images (left-to-right):
(a) mesh before deformation,
(b) illustration of mesh lines and defined muscles (red/yellow lines),
(c) Example deformation of the muscles.
Key elements
- Muscle-based models - deforming a polygon mesh with a specified set of 'virtual muscles'.
- Expression - a particular configuration of muscle contraction values.
- Animated expressions - interpolating between muscle contraction values produces a much more realistic effect than the traditional interpolation between mesh positions.
- Lip-synchronisation - using the animated expression technique to move the face between different 'expressions' for each part of the speech (phoneme).