Streaming facial data from Expression to 3ds Max

[Induce]

Hi Morgan, we testing Arena and Opti in Germany for a current project. Your Salesguys in Germany cannot help us a lot with details. We need to track a face built in 3 Ds. Our Artist only dealing with new 3Ds version 2011 soon 2012. Your plugins are from latest 2010 for 3ds max. We did not found a Manual f�r Plugin only Motion builder. The Setup with 7 cameras on windows 7 works well. The FS Camera do not show a plack/white picture. We have 2 systems for a test period of 30 days, but we are under time pressure with a solution for realtime tracking the face of our character built in 3ds. Please describe us what we have to do? We setting up the system already. now we need to trasnfer the character datas. We already export the 3ds rigged character datas. Do we habe to implement them into arena an how? How we will track the character ? Do we have to track the character in 3d max ? We need to track the face in realtime NOT recording! And we need a output in a LED-Screen Face only. Please try to describe what is needed. If possible lets have a fixed meeting via skype with our creative people. The team is whole monday 28.03.2011 available. Skype ID induce-ug. Thanks a lot for support, Olaf

[morgan]

Hi Olaf,

For non-realtime face animation, we recommend FaceRobot or Maya:

Expression -> C3D -> Face Robot / Maya


For realtime face animation, we recommend MotionBuilder:

Expression -> OptiTrack MotionBuilder Plugin -> MotionBuilder

These animation packages have excellent documentation for face animation using mocap data. For example, in MotionBuilder, refer to the "Actor/Character Face" section.

For 3DS max support, you might export your baked animation from Maya/FaceRobot/Mobu into 3DS via FBX, but I'm not a 3DS expert, so others here might have better pipeline suggestions?

Morgan

[davidtheory]

Hi people,

I want to do real time face animation without motion builder (suppose we have a library for animating a rigged face model and displaying it with openGL).

So I am using NatNet 2.2 to stream markers from a face template in Arena 1.7.1. and I have some questions:

1. Is there an option in the streaming tab in Arena or a function with NatNet, to get the head rigid motion (position & orientation) directly? how can I get the head rigid motion?

2. When getting the 3D marker data with NatNet, am I getting the local positions relative to a face local reference system? or am I getting them in global world coordinates? If they are local, how can I get the base vectors that define this face local reference system?

Any help would be really appreciated.

[dr.abobakr]

i have the same problem
i want to take the arena data and apply it to my own model using opengl