Phace uses physics simulation to animate digital faces. It captures real facial movements, infers muscle activations, then simulates gravity and wind to generate realistic expressions. You can edit the result: change BMI, enhance lips, modify the jaw, or simulate conditions like Bell's palsy.
Dear fellow scholars, this is two minute papers with this work is about transferring our gestures onto a virtual human's face in a way that is physically correct. This means that not only the changes in the facial geometry are transferred to a digital character. No, no, no. Here is how it works. This piece of work uses a really cool digital representation of our face that contains not only geometry, but there's also information about the bone and flesh and muscle structures as well. This means that it builds on a physically accurate model which synthesizes animations where this human face is actuated by the appropriate muscles. We start out with a surface scan of the user, which through a registration step is then converted to a set of expressions that we wish to achieve. The inverse physics module tries to guess exactly which muscles are used and how they are used to achieve these target expressions. The animation step takes information of how the desired target expressions evolve in time and some physics information such as gravity or wind. And the forward physics unit computes the final simulation of the digital character. So while we are talking about the effects of gravity and wind, here you can see how this can create more convincing outputs because these characters really become a part of their digital environment. As a result, the body mass index of a character can also be changed in both directions, slimming or fattening the face. Lip enhancement is also a possibility. If we had super high resolution facial scans, maybe a follow up work could simulate the effects of Botox injections. How cool would that be? Also, one of my favorite features of this technique is that it also enables artistic editing by means of drawing. We can also specify a map of stiffness and mass distributions. And if we feel cruel enough, we can create a barely functioning human face to model and animate virtual zombies. Imagine what artists could do with this, especially in the presence of super high resolution textures and photorealistic rendering. Oh my. Another glimpse of the future of computer graphics and animation. Make sure to have a look at the paper for more applications. For instance, they also demonstrate the possibility of modifying the chin and the jawbone. They even have some result in simulating the effect of Bell's palsy, which is the paralysis of facial muscles on one side while we are at this high note of illnesses. If you enjoyed this episode and would like to support us, you can pick up really cool perks like early access for all of these episodes on Patreon. The link is available in the video Description. Thanks for watching and for your generous support and I'll see you next time.
Sam.
