3D scan-based animation techniques for Chinese opera facial expression documentation

In the second half of the 20th century, Chinese opera, one of the oldest dramatic art forms with many different styles, underwent a serious decline. As several of these styles are on the verge of extinction, traditional methods to document Chinese opera are in progress—collecting and cross-referencing scripts, pictures, audios and videos. What appeal most in Chinese opera are the exaggerated painted facial make-up and expressions. Clearly, 3D facial animation technology is well suited for documenting this ancient dramatic art form. In this paper, we describe an experimental 3D graphics system for documenting Chinese opera facial make-up and expressions, which we have been developing over the last 3 years. Since realism is of utmost importance, we have architected our approach on the use of 3D scanners for capturing performers’ facial poses. Direct morphing of these 3D scanned facial poses can provide us animated facial expressions, but requires a number of significant technical issues to be resolved. The rest of this paper describes this system and the major issues that are addressed along with some experimental results.