“Fast and reusable facial rigging and animation” by Orvalho and Susin

Reproducing the subtleties of a face through animation requires developing a sophisticated character rig. But, creating by hand the inner structure and controls of each character is a very labor-intensive and time-consuming task. We developed an application that is 90–99% faster than traditional manual rigging. The application automatically transfers the rig and animations from the source to a target model. Unlike prior work related to morphing and re-targeting [1] that focus on transferring animations, we transfer the complete facial setup in addition to animations. Our method is general, so artists can define their own rig and then quickly apply it to different models, even with disparate proportions and appearance (human, cartoon or fantastic). This gives artists complete freedom to manipulate the characters: they can create new animations and not be limited by pre-generated ones.

1. Noh, J. I, Neumann, U. 2001. Expression Cloning. In SIGGRAPH’01 (2001), ACM PREss, pp. 277–288.