Character Transfer: Example-based individuality retargeting for facial animations

Abstract

A key disadvantage of blendshape animation is the labor-intensive task of sculpting blendshapes with individual expressions for each character. In this paper, we propose a novel system ”Character Transfer”, that automatically sculpts blendshapes with individual expressions by extracting them from training examples; this extraction creates a mapping that drives the sculpting process. Comparing our approach with the naïve method of transferring facial expressions from other characters, Character Transfer effectively sculpted blendshapes without the need to create such unnecessary blendshapes for other characters. Character Transfer is applicable even the training examples are limited to only a few number by using region segmentations of the face and the blending of the mappings.