Patent ID: 7450126

Claim:
A system for animating facial features comprising: means for defining a single subdivision surface approximating geometry of a plurality of different faces, the subdivision surface defined by a course mesh structure representing a transformed facial expression from a transformation function derived from data comprising: a training set of facial expressions of a face other than the plurality of different faces; and a code book containing a set of facial expressions of each of the plurality of different faces, wherein; each of the facial expressions in the training set corresponds to one of the facial expressions in the codebook; and the transforming function is configured to characterize deformations associated with the training set of facial expressions; and means for fitting the single subdivision surface to each of the plurality of faces in the codebook, wherein said means for fitting comprises: means for performing an optimization operation over vertex positions of the subdivision surface; and means for fitting the subdivision surface to the faces without altering connectivity of the mesh that defines the subdivision surface.