A demo of a dynamic facial UI for digital artists

Abstract

Character facial animation is difficult because the face of a character assumes many complex expressions. To achieve convincing visual results for animation, 3D digital artists need to prepare their characters with sophisticated control structures. One of the most important techniques to achieve good facial animation is to use facial control interfaces, also called facial user interfaces, or facial UI's. But facial UI's are usually dull and often confusing, with limited user interaction and no flexibility. We developed a concept and a working prototype of a dynamic facial UI inside the Blender [1] open-source software to allow their large community of digital artists to better control and organize the facial animation of a character. Our interactive system is running stable in the latest version of Blender and we started to build a full-face dynamic UI to show its interactive potential in a character's face. © 2011 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.