Fat Pad Cages for Facial Posing

TL;DR

This paper introduces Fat Pad cages, a novel facial mesh deformation technique that combines anatomical elements with cage representations, enabling non-artists to easily create realistic facial expressions with improved accuracy.

Contribution

It presents a new method integrating facial anatomy into cage-based deformation, with automatic cage creation and a filtering function to enhance expression realism.

Findings

Fat Pad cages outperform regular Green Coordinates in reproducing facial expressions.

The method allows quick sketching of realistic expressions without artistic skill.

User study confirms significant improvement over existing techniques.

Abstract

We introduce Fat Pad cages for posing facial meshes. It combines cage representation and facial anatomical elements, and enables users with no artistic skill to quickly sketch realistic facial expressions. The model relies on one or several cage(s) that deform(s) the mesh following the human fat pads map. We propose a new function to filter Green Coordinates using geodesic distances preventing global deformation while ensuring smooth deformations at the borders. Lips, nostrils and eyelids are processed slightly differently to allow folding up and opening. Cages are automatically created and fit any new unknown facial mesh. To validate our approach, we present a user study comparing our Fat Pad cages to regular Green Coordinates. Results show that Fat Pad cages bring a significant improvement in reproducing existing facial expressions.