Modeling Expressive Wrinkles and Hair for Virtual Humans

As virtual humans appear more frequently in various fields such as movies, video games, commercial films, and virtual reality, it becomes increasingly important to display them realistically. However, expressive wrinkles and dynamic hair, which play crucial parts in synthesizing an impressive human head model, are generally difficult to model and animate interactively because of their complexity. This thesis presents methods for modeling wrinkles and hair over virtual human head models. Wrinkles are created by displacing the skin surface based on their specified locations and shapes. Wrinkle amplitude is dynamically modulated according to skin surface deformation while animating the face with facial muscles. Hair is modeled with particles, the sampling points of the volume of hair defined over the scalp of the head model, in order to avoid explicit simulation of a large number of hair strands. Complex interactions of hair with the head, the hair itself, and the environment such as wind are rapidly handled with the particle dynamics. Both wrinkles and hair can be animated interactively.