We describe a system for animating virtual characters that encompasses many important aspects of character modeling for simulations and games. These include locomotion, facial animation, speech synthesis, reaching/grabbing, and various automated non-verbal behaviors, such as nodding, gesturing and eye saccades. Our system implements aspects of character animation from the research community tha...

This paper first summarizes our unique method to synthesize facial caricatures using eigenspaces. This method can handle shape features of each facial part and arrangement features of facial parts independently. Then, in order to provide a dynamic lifelike agent based on a synthesized facial caricature, a method to represent mouth shape changes corresponding to speech and a method to give facia...

Being able to produce realistic facial animation is crucial for many speech applications in language learning technologies. For reaching realism, it is necessary to acquire and to animate dense 3D models of the face. Recovering dense models is often achieved using stereovision techniques. Unfortunately, reconstruction artifacts are common and are mainly due to the difficulty to match points on ...

In order to enable face animation on the Internet using high quality synthetic speech, the Text-to-Speech (TTS) servers need to be implemented on network-based servers and shared by many users. The output of a TTS server is used to animate talking heads as defined in MPEG-4. The TTS server creates two sets of data: audio data and Phonemes with optional Facial Animation Parameters (FAP) like smi...

The integration of text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis and animation of synthetic faces allows new applications like visual human computer interfaces using agents or avatars. The TTS informs the talking head when phonemes are spoken. The appropriate mouth shapes are animated and rendered while the TTS produces the sound. We call this integrated system of TTS and animation a Visual TTS (VTTS). This p...

Blendshapes”, a simple linear model of facial expression, is the prevalent approach to realistic facial animation. It has driven animated characters in Hollywood films, and is a standard feature of commercial animation packages. The blendshape approach originated in industry, and became a subject of academic research relatively recently. This survey describes the published state of the art in t...

Realistic facial animation transfer from one individual to others has been a persistent challenge. In this paper, we present an effective method that transfers facial animation from 2D videos onto 3D faces in a visually pleasing manner. Our method is based on a Laplacian deformation framework. We represent the facial animation with the displacements of a set of feature points. By the assumption...

Accurate localization and tracking of facial features are crucial for developing high-quality model-based coding systems. In this paper we describe the integration of simple heuristics which are e!ective in improving the results of well-known facial feature detection with robust techniques for adapting a dynamic mesh for animation. A new method of generating a self-adaptive mesh using an extend...

Animation which uses three dimensional computer graphics relies heavily on geometric transformations over time for the motions of camera and objects. To make a figure walk or make a liquid bubble requires sophisticated motion control not usually available in commercial animation system,. This paper describes a way to animate a model of the human face . The animator can build a sequence of facia...

This work proposes a real-time virtual human multimodal expression model. Five modalities explore the affordances of the body: deterministic, non-deterministic, gesticulation, facial and vocal expression. Deterministic expression is keyframe body animation. Non-deterministic expression is robotics-based procedural body animation. Vocal expression is voice synthesis, through Festival, and parame...