Improvements on a simple muscle-based 3D face for realistic facial expressions

Facial expressions play an important role in face-to-face communication. With the development of personal computers capable of rendering high quality graphics, computer facial animation has produced more and more realistic facial expressions to enrich human-computer communication. In this paper, we present a simple muscle-based 3D face model that can produce realistic facial expressions in real time. We extend Waters´ (1987) muscle model to generate bulges and wrinkles and to improve the combination of multiple muscle actions. In addition, we present techniques to reduce the computation burden on the muscle model.