Artistic Face Modeling and Facial Expression Design for Cartoon Characters Animation
Shih-Kai Chung · 2009
As the most important tool in helping the animator to do the storytelling, character animation has been always a popular study in Computer Graphics. Having the more luxury in exaggeration to act out the character's personality, cartoon characters, naturally, develops into the focus of research and applications in computer animation. Character performance includes ”body movements” and ”facial expressions”, in which the later are much more exuberant since they reveal characters' feelings and compassions, thus become the experienced animators' common tool in describing characters. The success of cartoon character animation highly depends on the animation of facial expressions. Therefore, exquisite designing of facial expressions plays an important part of character animation. However, related published works are rare. This paper devotes on artistic facial expression design and implementation of 3D cartoon characters. The research goal of this study is set to develop the guidelines of designing for 3D character facial expressions. It first describes the problems and current status of facial animation. Then, after briefly reviewing the facial expression design and related animation techniques, the design guidelines of facial expression are suggested and discussed in details. At the end, the summary of facial expression design and the possible future study are offered as the conclusions.