Highly Realistic MPEG-4 Compliant Facial Animation with Charisma

The past 20 years of facial modeling and animation research have focused on improving facial animation systems´ believability, realism, flexibility, and applicability. The MPEG-4 standards define a technique for 3D facial and body model animations (FAPS / BAPS respectively), as seen in modern animation systems. The way this technique works is in contrast to the set of animation techniques currently used within modern games technologies and applications, which utilize more advanced, expressive animation systems such as Skeletal, Morph Target and Inverse Kinematics. This paper introduces a 3D Homura based framework for the integration and transformation of MPEG4 standards-compliant highly realistic animation streams known as Charisma, which can be applied for use with modern games animation systems and virtual characters in the web. This paper reports the development and the very good performance framework on top of our Java / OpenGL-based games engine framework Homura.