A demo of a facial UI design approach for digital artists

Abstract

In the character animation industry, animators use facial UI's to animate a character's face. A facial UI provides widgets and handles that the animator interacts with to control the character's facial regions. This paper presents a facial UI design approach to control the animation of the six basic facial expressions of the anthropomorphic face. The design is based in square shaped widgets [5] holding circular handles that allow the animator to produce the muscular activity relative to the basic facial expressions [1]. We have implemented a prototype of the facial UI design in the Blender open-source animation software and did a preliminary pilot study with three animators. Two parameters were evaluated: the number of clicks and the time taken to animate the six basic facial expressions. The study reveals there was little variation in the values each animator marked for both parameters, despite the natural difference in their creative performance.