Creating an actor-specific facial rig from performance capture

Abstract

Creating a high quality blendshape rig usually involves a large amount of effort from skilled artists. Although current 3D reconstruction technologies are able to capture accurate facial geometry of the actor, it is still very difficult to build a production-ready blendshape rig from unorganized scans. Removing rigid head motion and separating mixed expressions from the captures are two of the major challenges in this process. We present a technique that creates a facial blendshape rig based on performance capture and a generic face rig. The customized rig accurately captures actor-specific face details while producing a semantically meaningful FACS basis. The resulting rig faithfully serves both artist friendly keyframe animation and high quality facial motion retargeting in production.