Performance-based Expressive Character Animation

For decades, animation has been a popular storytelling technique. Traditional tools for creating animations are labor-intensive requiring animators to painstakingly draw frames and motion curves by hand. An alternative workflow is to equip animators with direct real-time control over digital characters via performance, which offers a more immediate and efficient way to create animation. Even when using these existing expression transfer and lip sync methods, producing convincing facial animation in real-time is a challenging task. In this position paper, I describe my past and proposed future research in developing interactive systems for perceptually-valid expression retargeting from humans to stylized characters, real-time lip sync for 2D animation, and building an expressive style aligned embodied conversational agent.