BlendForces: A Dynamic Framework for Facial Animation

Abstract

In this paper we present a new paradigm for the generation and retargeting of facial animation. Like a vast majority of the approaches that have adressed these topics, our formalism is built on blendshapes. However, where prior works have generally encoded facial geometry using a low dimensional basis of these blendshapes, we propose to encode facial dynamics by looking at blendshapes as a basis of forces rather than a basis of shapes. We develop this idea into a dynamic model that naturally combines the blendshapes paradigm with physics-based techniques for the simulation of deforming meshes. Because it escapes the linear span of the shape basis through time-integration and physics-inspired simulation, this approach has a wider expres- sive range than previous blendshape-based methods. Its inherent physically-based formulation also enables the simulation of more advanced physical interactions, such as collision responses on lip contacts.