Thesis

Title: "Fast and Reusable Facial Rigging and Animation: Create Once, Use Many"

This thesis presents a portable character rigging system that integrates into current animation production pipelines. It automatically transfers the facial rig and animations created for one character to different characters, independent of their shape and appearance. It enables artists to create more lifelike facial models in less time; about 90-99 percent faster than traditional manual rigging. Characters can display complex expressions and behavior, easier and with decreased artistic effort. As a result, we dramatically reduce the time needed to create high-quality facial animations for the entertainment industry.

Abstract: PDF (85 KB)

Chapter 1: PDF (235 KB)

If you want the complete PhD Thesis, send an email to veronica@FaceInMotion.com.

Presentation

The presentation describes contribution of our research and how we achieved the goal of "creating a portable character rigging system". It details the main challenges and problems in facial animation, both artistic and technological. It provides an overview of the state of the art related to facial animation. It describes the key elements of the technology behind the rigging system. It ends with the results we obtained and the validation performed with several film and videogame companies.

Presentation: Flash (17.2 MB) (1024x768)

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Videos

List of videos shown during the PhD defense presentation:

Introduction results: Flash (5,21 MB) 55 sec

Results and validation: Flash (13,5 MB) 2 min

"Taxi Driver" scene parody: Flash (2,18 MB) 25 sec

Opens in new window. Use Flash Player to play these videos (size 720x576, 24 fps).