Capturing Facial Animation

[Jim]

Hello:

Yes, facial mocap will come out this year.

The workflow is somewhat hard to determine, as there are a few ways to accomplish the task. There is no BVH format for facial data, so we have C3D points, or opticals you can work with in MotionBuilder.

We think the most likely setup will be seperate capture of facial and full body, then combine them in post. We can isolate the maker movement to be relative to the head, instead of the world, so it is much easier to apply the motion to a body.

Let us know what programs you work with and how you would like to use the data.

[dtaylor112]

Motionbuilder... hm, interesting. That's for Maya/3DS correct?

I use Poser/Carrara so I would look for a format I could utilize with those programs (most likely Poser). C3D points... is that compatible with these programs?

I think the separate motions could work well... but here's a question. Would the Frames for the body motions and the head motions need to be equal?

Let's say there're 1000 frames of body animations and 700 frames of facial animation. Would the simple way be to apply the facial animation at 300 frames in? If so would it be a smooth transition from frames 298, 299 and into 300?

I'm new to this (my 8 camera setup hasn't even been shipped yet!;-) but I know exactly what I need and want to do with this... I just need to know "How".

Thanks

[Jim]

Ah, got it now. We are working on special support for programs like Poser. There really is no good way to get the data into Poser at this time, in a generic way.

What do you think of DAZ? Would you use it instead of Poser?

I would overlay the same amount of facial animation to body animation, so it matched. You could do closeups where could see the facial animation better, and only use that part. There are probably lots of ways to do this and we get a lot of feedback from the customers I am sure.

[seanboyette]

I am all for Motionbuilder and c3d points applied to the actor face!

(you probably knew I would say that!)

Look forward to it guys!

Sean

[dtaylor112]

Hm... OK. It sounds like you guys are working on it. Do you run into problems often with Poser? Or have you just not gotten into it yet?

About Daz, I'm not 100% sure. I have it on my PC but I just always user Poser for animations, probably because it's fairly intuitive. Also, Carrara has a 'Transposer' that allows you to render Poser models (and they look so much better than when rendering in Poser) that I never saw the benefit of moving over to Daz.

Question: Why would the facial capture work well with Daz but not Poser? Odd... on sites like renderosity, there's waaay more action on the Poser forums than the daz forum (something like 1500 post on Daz and 100k posts on Poser) so that leads me to believe there are more Poser Users than Daz (at least on that site) - interesting.

Will you sell the markers for facial captures too? Looking forward to that!

[seanboyette]

In short the answer is, its kinda Possible -
That would yield you 2D results - a plane of data that can drive a facial rig. It does drive the rig, but not very well, if you use motionbuilder, I wrote a simple version to use one v100 to do this very thing.
The problem is that not many peoples faces are planar - and its difficult to get real detailed results.

Sean

[Jim]

We will look into Poser more. DAZ has a great SDK that allows us to directly control the models and face.

Yes, we will sell everything you need, desktop tripods, facial markers and the software.

[Yannick]

I would agree with Koan. Poser users are totaly much more than Daz one. I think facial captures will benefits more in Poser.

[vclaes]

hello all

I have a little question about capturing facial animation:

Into motionbuilder:

I make real time character animation for shows with motionbuilder and is't possible to make realtime animation with the full body optitrack?
An realtime facial animation directly into motionbuilder with the optitrack?


Thanks

[tvining]

When you say that you are working on special support for programs like Poser, do you mean just for facial capture, or do you mean for full-body mocap as well? Direct support for Poser would be sweet! As for Daz, maybe not Daz Studio, but support for the Daz figures (which are much better than the Poser base figures) would be ideal.

--Tim

http://www.auroratrek.com