Disney Research demonstrates a simplified approach to modelling faces
Disney Research has published a paper titled Interactive sculpting of digital faces using an anatomical modelling paradigm that proposes a new approach that is easy to use for beginners, consistently produces plausible face geometry, but still allows freedom beyond traditional video game avatar creation.
According to the paper “at the core of our system lies a specialized anatomical local face model (ALM), which is constructed from a dataset of several hundred 3D face scans. User edits are propagated to constraints for an optimization of our data-driven ALM model, ensuring the resulting face remains plausible even for simple edits like clicking and dragging surface points.”. The accompanying video shows how the various interaction methods are used, including direct control of the surface, indirect control of semantic features like age, ethnicity, gender, and BMI, as well as indirect control through manipulating the underlying bony structures.
Read the paper in full on the Disney Research website.
Soon we will need almost no skills to make great human models 🙂
And that’s a bummer for those who learned how to sculpt form scratch but great for production in general.