Real-Time Interactive Facial Animation

In this paper we describe methods for the generation of real-time facial animation for various virtual actor using high level-actions. These high-level actions allow the user to forget the technical side of the animation, and focus only on the more abstract, more natural, and intuitive part of the facial animation. The mechanisms developed to generate interactive high-level real-time animation are described and details are given on the method we use to blend several action to a smooth facial animation. These techniques have been integrated in a C++ library which functionalities are described. Finally an interactive real-time application performing facial animation and speech using this library is described and graphical results are presented.