Painting on Canvas: A Facial Sketching Control System

Facial Animation in films and videogames has traditionally relied on creating all the facial poses and animation controls in the early stages of a production. This process, whether for key framed controls or motion captured animation, takes a lot of time and effort. We present a novel sketching control system inspired in the way artists draw, where a stroke defines the shape of an object and reflects the user’s intention. We introduce the canvas, a 2D drawing region where the users can make their strokes. We present a Sketch-Based Free-Form Deformation technique that is used to create a real-time simple control system where facial deformation is sketched on, significantly speeding up the creation of poses. We show that the combination of strokes and canvases provides a new way to manipulate the shape of an implicit volume in space. As a result, we allow rapid prototyping of facial expressions on the fly in a very intuitive and interactive way. Our informal study showed that first time users typically master the system within seconds, creating appealing 3D facial poses and animations in just a few minutes.