A Practical Approach to Direct Manipulation Blendshapes

The original approach of direct manipulation blendshapes introduced a mathematical framework for manipulating blendshape face models directly and interactively while interoperating with traditional slider-based editing. This article introduces a few practical and useful techniques to the original work and presents the implementation details as a software tool. In addition, this article describes a statistical-prior algorithm that “learns” from previous animation and allows rapid creation of expressive animation in a given style. The animation examples illustrate how effectively this tool works for practical use.