MPEG-4 compliant reproduction of face animation created in Maya

This work presents a method for extracting facial information encoded in MPEG-4 format from an animated face model in Maya. The method generates the appropriate data, as specified in the MPEG-4 standard, such as the face definition parameters (FDPs), the face animation parameters (FAPs) and the facial animation table (FAT). The described procedure was implemented as a plug-in for Maya, which requires as inputs only the animated face model and the correspondence between its vertices and the FDPs. The extracted data were tested on a publicly available FAP-player in order to demonstrate the faithful reproduction of the face animation originally created with the high-end 3D graphics modeller. The capabilities of the publicly available FAP player have also been augmented in order to enable loading any proprietary face model and its corresponding FAT.