COURSE DESCRIPTION

Human ability to communicate via the subtlest of facial nuance makes animating an engaging anthropomorphic face arguably the most challenging aspect of character animation. The greater the rendered realism, the smaller the margin for animated imperfection before the character irreversibly loses credibility. This course provides instruction on the 3D modeling and animation of faces. The course will be conducted as a mix of instructor and guest lectures, student paper and project presentations.

COURSE OBJECTIVES

• Teach students the fundamental principles behind the anatomy, modeling, rigging, and interactive animation of 3D faces;
• Read, understand, present and critique state of the art research papers relevant to the course;
• Model and animate expressive 3D faces using existing software and rigs: Metahuman, Maya, JALI;
• Build technical prototypes to enable creative applications in facial animation;

COURSE STRUCTURE AND EVALUATION

Instruction in class will be a mix of lectures by the instructors and accomplished visitors, class discussions, and student presentations.
The deliverables in this course are a creative facial modeling and animation artifact 30%, a research paper presentation 30%, and a technical prototype (in groups of 2/3 students) 40%.

COURSE PRE-REQUISITES AND RESOURCES

The main pre-requisite for this course is a basid graduate level CS background and a desire to be visually  creative.  The course will make significant use of Maya and possibly Unreal,  so some familiarity working with 3D modeling/animation software and game engines is a plus. The course may also employ phones, headsets, eye-trackers and other devices for facial performance capture, as well as working with facial animation corpora. A list of software/hardware resources for the course, the list of student papers to be presented, and assigned projects will be posted off the quercus course page

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