  Production-level workflows for producing convincing 3D dynamic human faces
have long relied on an assortment of labor-intensive tools for geometry and
texture generation, motion capture and rigging, and expression synthesis.
Recent neural approaches automate individual components but the corresponding
latent representations cannot provide artists with explicit controls as in
conventional tools. In this paper, we present a new learning-based,
video-driven approach for generating dynamic facial geometries with
high-quality physically-based assets. For data collection, we construct a
hybrid multiview-photometric capture stage, coupling with ultra-fast video
cameras to obtain raw 3D facial assets. We then set out to model the facial
expression, geometry and physically-based textures using separate VAEs where we
impose a global MLP based expression mapping across the latent spaces of
respective networks, to preserve characteristics across respective attributes.
We also model the delta information as wrinkle maps for the physically-based
textures, achieving high-quality 4K dynamic textures. We demonstrate our
approach in high-fidelity performer-specific facial capture and cross-identity
facial motion retargeting. In addition, our multi-VAE-based neural asset, along
with the fast adaptation schemes, can also be deployed to handle in-the-wild
videos. Besides, we motivate the utility of our explicit facial disentangling
strategy by providing various promising physically-based editing results with
high realism. Comprehensive experiments show that our technique provides higher
accuracy and visual fidelity than previous video-driven facial reconstruction
and animation methods.
