José Serra

• Doctor of Philosophy
• PhD Student at University of Porto

Facial animation is a time-consuming and cumbersome task that requires years of experience and/or a complex and expensive set-up. This becomes an issue, especially when animating the multitude of secondary characters required, e.g. in films or video-games. We address this problem with a novel technique that relies on motion graphs to represent a la...

We present a new behavioural animation method that combines motion graphs for synthesis of animation and mind maps as behaviour controllers for the choice of motions, significantly reducing the cost of animating secondary characters. Motion graphs are created for each facial region from the analysis of a motion database, while synthesis occurs by m...

We propose a new mind map interface method for controlling virtual character's artificial intelligence and behavior in games. Commonly used techniques, such as scripting, require an extensive analysis and discrimination of all the possible behaviors that are triggered by the stimuli received by the virtual character. Scripting is also subject to st...

Visual speech animation, or lip synchronization, is the process of matching speech with the lip movements of a virtual character. It is a challenging task because all articulatory movements must be controlled and synchronized with the audio signal. Existing language-independent systems usually require fine tuning by an artist to avoid artefacts app...

Visual speech animation, also known as, lip synchronization is the process of matching a speech audio file with the lips' movements of a synthetic character. Visual speech is a very demanding task, be-ing done either fully manual, which is very time consuming, or with automatic methods based on data analysis. Currently there is still no automatic m...