Facial animation is one of the key points of the realism of 3D scenes featuring virtual humans. This is due to several reasons : face and the many muscles that compose it can generate a multitude of expressions ; then, our faculty of perception provides us a great ability to detect and analyze its smallest variations. This complexity is reflected in existing approaches by the fact that it is very difficult to create an animation without a long and a tedious manual work. Based on these observations, this thesis aims to develop techniques that contribute to the process of creating facial animation. Three main themes have been addressed. The first concerns the rigging issue of a virtual 3D face for animation. Rigging aims at defining control parameters in order to deform and animate the face. The second deals with the animation, especially on the animation retargeting issue. The goal is to propose a method to animate a character’s face from various data. These data can be obtained from a motion capture system or from an existing 3D facial animation. Finally, we focus on animation finescale details like wrinkles. Although these are thin and discreet, their deformations play an important part in the perception and analysis of emotions. Therefore we propose a monocular acquisition technique and a reference pose based method to synthetise dynamically animation fine details over the face. The purpose is to propose methods to facilitate and improve the process of creating realistic facial animations for interactive applications. We focused on ease to use in addition to the real-time aspect. Moreover, we offer the possibility to the user or graphist to interact in order to personalize its creation and/or improve the results
