¹School of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, China.
²School of Computer Information Engineering, Heilongjiang University of Science and Technology, Harbin, China

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Abstract—Realistic facial animation can enhance the immersion characteristic of 3D games. This paper proposes a 3D morphing target method based on GPU for real-time animation of facial expressions. We employ texture mapping to obtain a realistic appearance, and design a fast morphing process to achieve a relatively high FPS by modifying the morph data structure and implementing the morphing algorithm in the shader. The algorithm can be realized and divided into seven steps including creating morph target expressions, evaluating difference vector, initializing morph data structure, loading data into VBO, linking attributes to shader and rendering facial expressions. The rendering system also gives us convenient interaction with the digital character and realizes quick expressions shift for practical application. Experiment results show that the proposed approach yields realistic real-time expressions animation.

Index Terms—Morphing target, real-time, facial expression, realistic appearance, digital character.

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Cite: Mengzhao Yang, Kuanquan Wang, Lei Zhang, "Realistic Real-time Facial Expressions Animation via 3D Morphing Target," Journal of Software vol. 8, no. 2, pp. 418-425, 2013.