Example Facial Animations

These pages contain examples of facial animations created using hierarchical B-spline as the underlying surface representation. Examples include:

Human Speech

Haida Indian Mask (Student Project)

Scales for the Dragon

The Dragon

The Human Eye

Expression Interpolation

A Barking Dog

Talking Head Animations

What is it saying? (MPEG) In Quicktime Format

'Real' Scales

Standard h-spline animations of scales... note stretching of the scales(MPEG 298K)

Scales with common origin... note rigidity of the scales(MPEG 298K)

Dragon

Dragon head with dynamics-based secondary animation (MPEG)

NEW Talking Dragon. Facial Features driven by MPEG-4 encodings (1.4Meg)

Goesta created these models of a human eye using hierarchical B-splines. The entire surface, including the eyelashes, is a single continuous B-spline surface. Two skeletal segments were created and positioned within the eye. The upper and lower eyelid were attached to the segments at 3 levels in the hierarchy: one level controls the deformation of the entire eyelid so that it stretches reasonably, the others to lock down the eyelashes themselves.

The surface itself is 1024 patches, defined with 565 data points (animated!). A regular B-spline would use about 2000 data points.

Canine Facial Animation

MPEG where mouth & neck are animated

MPEG where mouth, neck, eyes & ears are animated

NEW Talking Dog. Facial Features driven by MPEG-4 encodings (1.3Meg)

The dog surface was built by Goesta Struve-Dencher as a static exercise. A skeleton was created and attached the surface to open and close the mouth in five minutes. During a U.B.C. CISCR/CS open house, somebody asked if the ears could move. They couldn't, but seven minutes later, they did (And it was good). Later, a neck was added and attached to the rest of the surface in about twenty minutes. The eyes were another ten minute exercise. A parametric animation system built into the "Dragon" editor was used to define a smile and the positions for the jaw, neck, and eyelids which were used in the animations.

Human Facial Animation

Laughing MPEG

The model was created in SoftImage, and is an early prototype for the character "Mouse" in the YTV/ABC televisions series "ReBoot" (They do not use hierarchical splines for Reboot!). The original standard bicubic B-spline was imported to the "Dragon" editor and a hierarchy automatically constructed. The surface was attached to a jaw to allow it to open and close the mouth. Groups of control vertices were then moved around to created various facial expressions. None of the expressions took more than 20 minutes to build, the shortest took about five minutes (we timed it). Three of these expressions were chosen as key shapes, the spline surface was exported back to SoftImage, and the key shapes were interpolated to create the final animation taking another 15 minutes. Here are some more expressions: