Systems and Methods for Generating a Skull Surface for Computer Animation

A system for generating a skull surface 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 the respective skin surface;
• a data interface configured to obtain, from a database, a tissue depth dataset including a plurality of tissues depths corresponding to a plurality of tissue depth points on a human face, wherein each tissue depth indicates a distance from a corresponding tissue depth point on the human face to a skull surface underneath the human face;
• one or more processors configured to:
• determine, from the plurality of facial scans, a three-dimensional facial skin topology of the live actor;
• generate, from the three-dimensional facial skin topology and the tissue depth dataset, a skull surface topology;
• and
• refine the skull surface topology via a neural network by learning the plurality of facial scans 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 skull surface 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 the respective skin surface;
• obtaining, from a database, a tissue depth dataset including a plurality of tissues depths corresponding to a plurality of tissue depth points on a human face, wherein each tissue depth indicates a distance from a corresponding tissue depth point on the human face to a skull surface underneath the human face;
• determining, from the plurality of facial scans, a three-dimensional facial skin topology of the live actor;
• generating, from the three-dimensional facial skin topology and the tissue depth dataset, a skull surface topology;
• and
• refining the skull surface topology via a neural network by learning the plurality of facial scans and using muscle or skin parameters derived from the plurality of facial scans as ground truth labels.