Easy Rigging of Face by Automatic Registration and Transfer of Skinning Parameters

Preparing a facial mesh to be animated requires a laborious manual rigging process. The rig specifies how the input animation data deforms the surface and allows artists to manipulate a character. We present a method that automatically rigs a facial mesh based on Radial Basis Functions (RBF) and linear blend skinning approach. Our approach transfers the skinning parameters (feature points and their envelopes, ie. point-vertex weights), of a reference facial mesh (source) already rigged to the chosen facial mesh (target) by computing an automatic registration between the two meshes. There is no need to manually mark the correspondence between the source and target mesh. As a result, inexperienced artists can automatically rig facial meshes and start right away animating their 3D characters, driven for instance by motion capture data.