Physical Blendshapes - Controllable Physics for Human Faces

Creating convincing human facial animation is challenging. Face animation is often hand-crafted by artists separately from body motion. Alternatively, if the face animation is derived from motion capture, it is typically performed while the actor is relatively still. Recombining the isolated face animation with body motion is non-trivial and often results in uncanny results if the body dynamics are not properly reflected on the face (e.g. cheeks wiggling when running). In this talk, I will discuss the challenges of human soft tissue simulation and control. I will then present our method for adding physical effects to facial blendshape animation. Unlike previous methods that try to add physics to face rigs, our method can combine facial animation and rigid body motion consistently while preserving the original animation as closely as possible. Our novel simulation framework uses the original animation as per-frame rest-poses without adding spurious forces. We also propose the concept of blendmaterials to give artists an intuitive means to control the changing material properties due to muscle activation.