MIMIC - a language for specifying facial animations

Abstract

This paper introduces a versatile language for specifying facial animations. The language Mimic can be used together with any facial animation system that employs animation parameters varying over time to control the animation. In addition to the automatic alignment of individual actions, the user can fine-tune the temporal alignment of actions relatively to each other. A set of predefined functions can be used to control oscillatory behavior of actions. Temporal constraints are resolved automatically by the Mimic compiler. We describe the grammar of Mimic, give some hints on the implementation of the Mimic compiler, and show some examples of animation code together with snapshots from the resulting animation.