Systems and methods for generating a skull surface for computer animation

A system for generating a bone surface depicting at least a portion of a skull of a live actor, the system comprising:

• an input interface configured to obtain a plurality of facial scans of the live actor, each facial scan including a respective skin surface and respective sensing data indicative of facial muscle strains corresponding to a set of facial muscles;
• a communication interface configured to obtain, from a database, a tissue depth dataset including a tissue depth indicating a distance from a corresponding surface point on the human face to a skull surface underneath the human face;
• one or more processors configured to:
• derive a bone surface based on a skin surface generated from the plurality of facial scans and the tissue depth dataset;
• refine the bone surface based on a user input via a user interface;
• and
• refine the bone surface via a neural network by inputting to the neural network the plurality of facial scans and a tissue depth array from the tissue depth dataset, and using muscle or skin parameters derived from the plurality of facial scans as ground truth labels.

A computer-readable non-transitory medium storing computer-executable instructions for generating a bone surface depicting at least a portion of a skull of a live actor, the computer-executable instructions being executed by one or more processors to perform operations comprising:

• obtaining a plurality of facial scans of the live actor, each facial scan including a respective skin surface and respective sensing data indicative of facial muscle strains corresponding to a set of facial muscles;
• obtaining, from a database, a tissue depth dataset including a tissue depth indicating a distance from a corresponding surface point on the human face to a skull surface underneath the human face;
• deriving a bone surface based on a skin surface generated from the plurality of facial scans and the tissue depth dataset;
• refining the bone surface based on a user input via a user interface;
• and
• refining the bone surface via a neural network by inputting to the neural network the plurality of facial scans and a tissue depth array from the tissue depth dataset, and using muscle or skin parameters derived from the plurality of facial scans as ground truth labels.