In this paper a new adaptation-based method is presented to reconstruct animatable facial models of human individuals from scan data. An anatomy-based generic control model serves as the starting point for our adaptation algorithm. Based on a series of measurements between the specified 3D landmarks, a global adaptation is carried out to align the generic control model to the scan surface. A local adaptation then deforms the geometry of the generic model to fit all of its vertices to the scan surface. The high-resolution geometry of the scan surface is represented as a displacement map which is generated using an offset-envelope mapping. Reconstruction of high-resolution geometry on the adapted generic mesh is achieved by hierarchical refinement using a surface subdivision scheme with resampling of the displacement map.