Real-time Simulation of Wrinkles

Skin wrinkles add realism and expressiveness to 3D facial animation. Modeling and animation of facial wrinkles have been challenging tasks due to the variety of conformations and details subtleness that wrinkles can exhibit. In this paper, we describe a method for real-time simulation of wrinkles taking advantage of the processing power of current GPUs. Our approach is based on a GPU shader program that uses a simple normal mapping approach to apply wrinkles according to influence areas on the face. For efficiency, all the data required for the simulation is comprised in 3D textures. We developed a reusable and extensible XNA component that implements the shader and tools for generating the necessary 3D textures. Currently, this component uses precomputed facial expressions, which are linear interpolated on the CPU. Nevertheless, it can be easily extended to other deformation approaches, such as key-frames or virtual muscles, without increasing the amount of texture data. We present a description of the developed component, applications and screenshots to illustrate the results