Disney's New Approach to Sculpting Digital Faces

Сreating 3D human faces is a challenging and time-consuming task. To create one, you need a highly-skilled artist, complex tools like ZBrush, or you can use constrained simple interfaces but you won't get a high-quality result.

The Disney research team presented a novel interactive method for the creation of digital faces that is said to be simple and intuitive to use. The toolkit produces plausible 3D face geometry, and allows "editing freedom beyond traditional video game avatar creation".

"At the core of our system lies a specialized anatomical local face model (ALM), which is constructed from a dataset of several hundred 3D face scans," wrote the team. "User edits are propagated to constraints for optimization of our data-driven ALM model, ensuring the resulting face remains plausible even for simple edits like clicking and dragging surface points."

The team promises the ability to edit semantic features like age, ethnicity, gender, and BMI, and the control over the underlying bony structures. The new method was created for low-budget VFX and animation productions. They also noted that traditional game engine avatar design toolkits can benefit from this paradigm too.

You can find the team's paper here.