Physically-Based Facial Modeling and Animation with Unity3D Game Engine

Abstract

Facial expression plays a fundamental role in conveying emotions to a 3D virtual character. This paper presents an automatic and effective approach for 3D face segmentation, feature extraction, rigging and animation. The 3D model we used is a triangular mesh model in OBJ file format. Combining the position information and neighbor coordinates of the points, the facial segmentation and feature extraction can be finished based on Gaussian curvature, shape indexes and face geometry. Furthermore, face rigging mainly includes two sub-models: skeleton and muscle model. Our rigging method is general that people can define their own rig and then quickly apply it to different model. Finally, the rigging model can be driven by emotion data in BVH file format. Also, to validate our approach, we have achieved in running experimentations on 3D facial in Unity3D engine. The result illustrates that our approach is usable and effective.