S3: Speech, Script and Scene driven Head and Eye Animation

Abstract

We present S 3 , a novel approach to generating expressive, animator-centric 3D head and eye animation of characters in conversation. Given speech audio, a Directorial script and a cinematographic 3D scene as input, we automatically output the animated 3D rotation of each character's head and eyes. S 3 distills animation and psycho-linguistic insights into a novel modular framework for conversational gaze capturing: audio-driven rhythmic head motion; narrative script-driven emblematic head and eye gestures; and gaze trajectories computed from audio-driven gaze focus/aversion and 3D visual scene salience. Our evaluation is four-fold: we quantitatively validate our algorithm against ground truth data and baseline alternatives; we conduct a perceptual study showing our results to compare favourably to prior art; we present examples of animator control and critique of S 3 output; and present a large number of compelling and varied animations of conversational gaze.