Eyelid kinematics for virtual characters

When compared to gaze, animation of the eyelids has been largely overlooked in the computer graphics literature. Eyelid movement plays an important part both in conveying accurate gaze direction and in improving the visual appearance of virtual characters. Eyelids have two major motion components: lid saccades that follow the vertical rotation the eyes, and blinking. Derived from literature in ophthalmology and psychology, this paper presents parametric models for both motion types, and emphasizes their dynamic temporal behaviour. Experimental validation classifies model-generated animation as similar to that encoded from expensive motion captured data, and significantly exceeding linearly interpolated animation. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.