A Simple Approach to Animating Virtual Characters by Facial Expressions Reenactment

Animating virtual characters is one of the core problems in virtual reality. Facial animations are able to intuitively express emotion and attitudes of virtual characters, However, creating facial animations is a non-trivial task. It depends on either expensive motion capture devices or human designers' time and effort to tune the animation parameters, In this work, we propose a learning-based approach to animate virtual characters by facial expression reenactment from abundant image data. This approach is simple yet effective, and is generalizable to various 3D characters. Preliminary evaluation results demonstrate its effectiveness and its potential to accelerate the development of VR applications.