The synthesis of 3D facial animations from speech has garnered considerable attention. Due to the scarcity of high-quality 4D facial data and well-annotated abundant multi-modality labels, previous methods often suffer from limited realism and a lack of lexible conditioning. We address this challenge through a trilogy. We first introduce Generalized Neural Parametric Facial Asset (GNPFA), an efficient variational auto-encoder mapping facial geometry and images to a highly generalized expression latent space, decoupling expressions and identities. Then, we utilize GNPFA to extract high-quality expressions and accurate head poses from a large array of videos. This presents the M2F-D dataset, a large, diverse, and scan-level co-speech 3D facial animation dataset with well-annotated emotional and style labels. Finally, we propose Media2Face, a diffusion model in GNPFA latent space for co-speech facial animation generation, accepting rich multi-modality guidances from audio, text, and image. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model not only achieves high fidelity in facial animation synthesis but also broadens the scope of expressiveness and style adaptability in 3D facial animation.
We propose an end-to-end deep-learning approach for automatic rigging and retargeting of 3D models of human faces in the wild. Our approach, called Neural Face Rigging (NFR), holds three key properties: (i) NFR's expression space maintains human-interpretable editing parameters for artistic controls; (ii) NFR is readily applicable to arbitrary facial meshes with different connectivity and expressions; (iii) NFR can encode and produce fine-grained details of complex expressions performed by arbitrary subjects. To the best of our knowledge, NFR is the first approach to provide realistic and controllable deformations of in-the-wild facial meshes, without the manual creation of blendshapes or correspondence. We design a deformation autoencoder and train it through a multi-dataset training scheme, which benefits from the unique advantages of two data sources: a linear 3DMM with interpretable control parameters as in FACS, and 4D captures of real faces with fine-grained details. Through various experiments, we show NFR's ability to automatically produce realistic and accurate facial deformations across a wide range of existing datasets as well as noisy facial scans in-the-wild, while providing artist-controlled, editable parameters.