Papers for

3d character animators

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Topology-agnostic method improves facial mesh animation accuracy

TopoRig: Topology-Agnostic Facial Rigging via Multi-Source Supervision

Abstract: Automatic facial rigging across heterogeneous mesh topologies remains challenging because high-quality expression supervision is often tied to canonical templates, while deformation transfer to arbitrary meshes can introduce geometric artifacts and correspondence errors. We present TopoRig, a topology-agnostic facial rigging framework that predicts FACS-conditioned deformations directly on input mesh vertices while preserving the original topology. Starting from the ICT FaceKit expression model, we construct complementary supervision from accurate but template-biased common-topology rigs, topology-diverse but noisier transferred rigs, and targeted image-based cues for controls poorly captured by geometric transfer. TopoRig combines local surface geometry, landmark-relative semantic features, global shape context, and FACS controls to predict per-vertex displacements. We train on 3,496 generated identities using 45 non-gaze expression controls from the 53-control ICT FaceKit vocabulary. On held-out identities and unseen mesh topologies, TopoRig more faithfully reproduces the reference expression space than prior neural facial-rigging methods, while qualitative results show consistent localized deformations across diverse character geometries. Ablations demonstrate that semantic landmark features and complementary supervision improve cross-identity and cross-topology generalization. Overall, TopoRig amortizes heterogeneous and imperfect expression supervision into a single topology-preserving deformation model.

Mon 14 SeptGraphicsComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Animating facial expressions on 3D models with different structures is tough because most teaching examples come from a single standard face shape. The authors created TopoRig, which can add facial movements directly to any face model without changing its structure. They taught it using a mix of good quality but limited examples, noisier diverse examples, and special image clues, making it better at mimicking expressions on new faces and shapes. This approach keeps the original model’s design intact and produces more natural-looking facial animations.
Open 2609.15746v1