Research Article
A Comparative Study of Four 3D Facial Animation Methods: Skeleton, Blendshape, Audio-Driven, and Vision-Based Capture
@INPROCEEDINGS{10.1007/978-3-031-28993-4_3, author={Mingzhu Wei and Nicoletta Adamo and Nandhini Giri and Yingjie Chen}, title={A Comparative Study of Four 3D Facial Animation Methods: Skeleton, Blendshape, Audio-Driven, and Vision-Based Capture}, proceedings={ArtsIT, Interactivity and Game Creation. 11th EAI International Conference, ArtsIT 2022, Faro, Portugal, November 21-22, 2022, Proceedings}, proceedings_a={ARTSIT}, year={2023}, month={4}, keywords={Facial Animation Emotion Recognition Animation Perception Affective Animated Agents}, doi={10.1007/978-3-031-28993-4_3} }- Mingzhu Wei
Nicoletta Adamo
Nandhini Giri
Yingjie Chen
Year: 2023
A Comparative Study of Four 3D Facial Animation Methods: Skeleton, Blendshape, Audio-Driven, and Vision-Based Capture
ARTSIT
Springer
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-28993-4_3
Abstract
In this paper, the authors explore different approaches to animating 3D facial emotions, some of which use manual keyframe animation and some of which use machine learning. To compare approaches the authors conducted an experiment consisting of side-by-side comparisons of animation clips generated by skeleton, blendshape, audio-driven, and vision-based capture facial animation techniques. Ninety-five participants viewed twenty face animation clips of characters expressing five distinct emotions (anger, sadness, happiness, fear, neutral), which were created using the four different facial animation techniques. After viewing each clip, the participants were asked to identify the emotions that the characters appeared to be conveying and rate their naturalness. Findings showed that the naturalness ratings of the happy emotion produced by the four methods tended to be consistent, whereas the naturalness ratings of the fear emotion created with skeletal animation were significantly higher than the other methods. Recognition of sad and neutral emotions were very low for all methods as compared to the other emotions. Overall, the skeleton approach had significantly higher ratings for naturalness and higher recognition rate than the other methods.
