Systems and Methods for Generating a Skull Surface for Computer Animation

An animation system wherein a machine learning model is adopted to generate animated facial actions based on parameters obtained from a live actor. Specifically, the anatomical structure such as a facial muscle topology and a skull surface topology that are specific to the live actor may be used. A skull surface that is specific to a live actor based on facial scans of the live actor and generic tissue depth data. For example, the facial scans of the live actor may provide a skin surface topology of the live actor, based on which the skull surface underneath the skin surface can be derived by “offsetting” the skin surface with corresponding soft tissue depth at different sampled points on the skin surface.