Easy Rigging of Face by Automatic Registration and Transfer of Skinning Parameters

Abstract. Preparing a facial mesh to be animated requires a labori-ous manual rigging process. The rig specifies how the input animation data deforms the surface and allows artists to manipulate a character. We present a method that automatically rigs a facial mesh based on Radial Basis Functions (RBF) and linear blend skinning approach. Our approach transfers the skinning parameters (feature points and their en-velopes, ie. point-vertex weights), of a reference facial mesh (source)-already rigged- to the chosen facial mesh (target) by computing an au-tomatic registration between the two meshes. There is no need to man-ually mark the correspondence between the source and target mesh. As a result, inexperienced artists can automatically rig facial meshes and start right away animating their 3D characters, driven for instance by motion capture data. 1 Introduction and Related Work Modeling 3D faces is becoming more and more automatic and common with sys