Vittorio Cuculo, Alessandro D'Amelio
PHuSe Lab - Dipartimento di Informatica, Università degli Studi di Milano

Paper Cuculo, V., & D’Amelio, A. (2019, August). OpenFACS: an open source FACS-based 3D face animation system. In International Conference on Image and Graphics (pp. 232-242). Springer, Cham.
https://rd.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-34110-7_20

OpenFACS is an open source FACS-based 3D face animation system. OpenFACS is a software that allows the simulation of realistic facial expressions through the manipulation of specific action units as defined in the Facial Action Coding System. OpenFACS has been developed together with an API which is suitable to generate real-time dynamic facial expressions for a three-dimensional character. It can be easily embedded in existing systems without any prior experience in computer graphics.

To launch the openFACS application:

1. Download the tar file:

wget https://github.com/phuselab/openFACS/releases/download/1.0.1/openFACS_Linux.tar.gz

2. Untar the package

tar xvf openFACS_Linux.tar.gz

3. Make the script executable:

chmod +x ActionUnitsFace.sh

3. Run it:

./ActionUnitsFace.sh

4. This will open an UDP server on localhost, port 5000.

The 3D model is reachable by sending a JSON message formatted as follows, where the labels are self-explaining:

{
    'AU1': 0, 'AU2': 0, 'AU4': 0, 'AU5': 0, 'AU6': 0,
    'AU7': 5, 'AU9': 0, 'AU10': 0, 'AU12': 0, 'AU14': 3,
    'AU15': 0, 'AU17': 0, 'AU20': 0, 'AU23': 0, 'AU25': 0,
    'AU26': 5, 'AU28': 0, 'AU45': 0, 'Speed': 0.05
}

Folder python/ does contain an API accessible via scripts in demo/ folder, that reflect prototypical facial expressions: anger, contempt, disgust, fear, happiness, neutral, sadness, shock, surprise. As example, demo/sadness.py:

from openFACS import sendAUS
AU = [5,0,5,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,5,3,0,0,0,0,0,0]
sendAUS(AU,0.05)

Alternatively, the folder python/ also contains a script that launches a simple GUI that can be used to interact intuitively with the animation.

1️⃣ - Turn off all livingness effects
2️⃣ - Turn on all livingness effects
3️⃣ - Toggle Blinking
4️⃣ - Toggle Neck movements
5️⃣ - Toggle Mouth movements
6️⃣ - Toggle Eyes movements
F11 - Toggle Fullscreen

Folder source/ does contain the Unreal Engine 4 project to re-build the application.

If you use this code or data, please cite the paper:

@inproceedings{cuculo2019openfacs,
    author="Cuculo, Vittorio and D'Amelio, Alessandro",
    editor="Zhao, Yao and Barnes, Nick and Chen, Baoquan and Westermann, R{\"u}diger and Kong, Xiangwei and Lin, Chunyu",
    title="OpenFACS: An Open Source FACS-Based 3D Face Animation System",
    booktitle="Image and Graphics",
    year="2019",
    publisher="Springer International Publishing",
    address="Cham",
    pages="232--242",
}

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details

We gratefully acknowledge the support of Stefano Palma for the the development of the graphical part and NVIDIA Corporation with the donation of the Quadro P6000 GPU used for this research.