Laplacian face blending

• Published in: Computer animation and virtual worlds Vol. 34; no. 2
• Main Authors: Mazala, Diego, Esperança, Claudio, Marroquim, Ricardo
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Chichester Wiley Subscription Services, Inc 01.03.2023
• Subjects: Artists; Blending; detail transfer; digital humans; face modeling; Visual perception
• ISSN: 1546-4261; 1546-427X
• DOI: 10.1002/cav.2044

Designing realistic tridimensional facial models is a challenging task, not only due to the effort and artistic abilities required but also because human visual perception is very tuned to the processing of facial features. For this reason, rather than creating face models from scratch, artists usually start from a scanned model of a real person. In this work, we present a novel method for blending human faces in order to create a new one. In a nutshell, our proposal uses Laplacian smoothing to segregate layers of details from one or more faces, which are then integrated into a base face with the help of an interactive and visual editor. In particular, our method supports blending multiple faces and multiple sub‐regions in those faces. Since our approach is intuitive and relatively easy to implement, it can be integrated into artistic pipelines aiming at designing human face models from preexisting ones. Details from one head model are transferred to a target model, generating a new head model. A new model can also be created from multiple input meshes with different weights.