Character Animation has a crucial role in modern videogames: it is essential to provide a realistic and immersive experience to the users. This chapter presents the main problems when preparing characters for animation, describes current solutions, and discusses published research and future directions in the fields of character rigging and animation. Its main focus is on facial animation, whic...

We present a system for tracking facial expression and head pose with one camera and no special markers, and generating a face animation to imitate these expressions simultaneously. The tracking is based on Gabor wavelet coefficients (jets) of the facial feature points, a saccadic searching strategy, and a model-based adjustment. Using Principal Components Analysis (PCA), we established an expr...

Embodied conversational agents are virtual characters that engage users in conversation with appropriate speech, gesture, and facial expression. The high cost of developing embodied conversational agents has led to a recent increase in open source agent platforms. In this paper, we present XNAgent, an open source platform for embodied conversational agents based on the XNA Framework. By leverag...

$%675$&7 In this paper we discuss an extension of the Algebra of Expressions, an algebraic structure introduced in an earlier paper, consisting of a set of operators and related properties defined over a set that is a generalization of the MPEG-4’s Facial Animation Parameters. In particular, we extend the definition of the operators acting on whole animations, i.e. sequences of frames represent...

Facial expression is one of the most expressive ways for human beings to deliver their emotion, intention, and other nonverbal messages in face to face communications. In this chapter, a layered parametric framework is proposed to synthesize the emotional facial expressions for an MPEG4 compliant talking avatar based on the three dimensional PAD model, including pleasure-displeasure, arousal-no...

MPEG-4 is the international coding standard developed for information transfer via low bit-rate communication channels. This article is the report on an experimental implementation of full-automatic pipeline MPEG-4 Synthetic Video Facial Animation (Simple Profile). This REAL-TIME pipeline includes the automatic detection, encoding, network transfer, and decoding of the facial animation paramete...

We present a novel Facial Motion Cloning method relying on the combination of the radial basis functions (RBF) based scattered data interpolation with the encoding capabilities of the MPEG-4 Facial and Body Animation (FBA) international standard. Beside from an initial manual selection of feature points, our method works fully automatically without user interaction. The produced talking head is...

Both the AVSP and FAA conferences have a common focus on facial communication research. The AVSP conference concentrates on how auditory and visual speech information plays a role in human perception, machine recognition, and human-machine interaction. FAA focuses on facial animation analysis and synthesis addressed in the fields of computer graphics, computer vision and psychology. The aim of ...

Facial feature tracking for model–based coding has evolved over the past decades. Of particular interest is its application in very low bit rate coding in which optimization is used to analyze head and shoulder sequences. We present the results of a computational experiment in which we apply a combination of non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm and a deterministic search to find optimal faci...

Speech animation is traditionally considered as important but tedious work for most applications, especially when taking lip synchronization (lip-sync) into consideration, because the muscles on the face are complex and interact dynamically. Although there are several methods proposed to ease the burden on artists to create facial and speech animation, almost none are fast and efficient. In thi...