Artist Friendly Facial Animation Retargeting

Abstract

This paper presents a novel facial animation retargeting system that is carefully designed to support the animator's workflow. Observation and analysis of the animators' often preferred process of key-frame animation with blendshape models informed our research. Our retargeting system generates a similar set of blend-shape weights to those that would have been produced by an animator. This is achieved by rearranging the group of blendshapes into several sequential retargeting groups and solving using a matching pursuit-like scheme inspired by a traditional key-framing approach. Meanwhile, animators typically spend a tremendous amount of time simplifying the dense weight graphs created by the retargeting. Our graph simplification technique effectively produces editable weight graphs while preserving the visual characteristics of the original retargeting. Finally, we automatically create GUI controllers to help artists perform key-framing and editing very efficiently. The set of proposed techniques greatly reduce the time and effort required by animators to achieve high quality retargeted facial animations.