On the Use of 3D Scanner for Chinese Opera Documentation

摘要

Chinese opera, a heritage performance art with many different styles and of great popularity in the mid 20th century is undergoing a major decline in recent times. There are ongoing efforts initiated by the Chinese government to document this heritage of humanity based on photographs and audio records of renowned master artists. All these efforts are based on the use of technologies for still and video imaging, with their own serious difficulties, as enunciated by the project leaders. With rapid and tremendous advances in 3D graphics, use of 3D virtual humans is an exciting new medium of documentation. In this paper we discuss our efforts towards this approach. Our documentation proposal makes use of 3D body scanning technology for capture of facial expressions for combining it with the well established motion capture technology for capturing body movements from young artists, along with audio from master artists. Our initial efforts have been devoted to facial expression capture and synthesis using 3D scan data. The paper brings out major issues, problems and some of our proposed solutions in using this approach for documentation.