Facial Animation

"Much human communication is conveyed by facial expression"
(Faigin 1990)

As part of my university course, I decided to work on facial animation techniques for the use in computer games. This keynote project was the final result of my 4th year honours project at abertay university, its final hand-in date marking the end of a long university career.

Time elapsed: 1 university year (4th)

This project took an in depth look into the field of facial animation, with emphasis on use in the realms of real-time gaming. It examines why facial animation should be used as standard in games that rely heavily on a central storyline, and how, by adding simple facial movements to an otherwise static model, more emotion and atmosphere can be added through one facial state than through many lines of descriptive speech.

The dissertation begins with a description of the current state of facial animation in real-time games, and the techniques that are used to achieve this. Once described, the advantages and disadvantages of each technique are carefully balanced and weighed, and the most appropriate is chosen to implement as a software project.

This document then describes the implementation of the software, the research involved in its concept, the techniques examined and used, and the final structure taken on by the code.

Finally, an examination into the completion of the software product demonstrates its ability to convey emotions in real time. The limitations and shortcomings of the project are underlined with recommendations on how to solve them and improve the project for future iterations of the application.

Accompanying this project was a real-time facial animation system for demonstration purposes. This project was the culmination of a university year of research and experimentation, and demonstrates successfully how simple techniques can be used to achieve a realistic emotive system. This software is available to download and try out, please do so and if you like it, e-mail me and tell me! If you experience any difficulties using it please don't just give up, send me an e-mail and ill be glad to help!

"Playable" software application - Windows (420 KB)

Also newly available is the FaceApp for Linux users! Oh yes, as I have been using Linux instead of Windows for sometime now, I thought I would try my hand at porting to another operating system, and while not exactly the same, it really is only minor differences that allows you to tell the two apart. Im glad to say that the code I created for the application last year was well designed enough for me to transfer it entirely to Linux in only a few days (on and off).

In order for you to run this App under Linux, you will need to install Mesa 3D, the Linux port of OpenGL, as OpenGL does not come as standard like it does on Windows systems. Get it here.

"Playable" software application - Linux (207 KB)

If you are interested by this subject, or would like to find out more about it, why not look at my dissertation which I will e-mail to you upon request. Also available directly from me is the source code, which I will freely distribute (both Windows and Linux versions). Please e-mail me to receive the files.

If you encounter any problems, please e-mail me and it will allow me to fix the problems for later users, and if for some reason you cite any of my work, please have the courtesy to e-mail me and site me as a reference. My email address is in the "email" section of this site. Thanks!

All files are "zipped" use an application such as WinZip to decompress these files.
Picture at the top of the page is from the PS2 game "the Getaway"