If you are looking for cheap face tracking you could try Brekel Pro Face, it uses a depth sensor camera like Faceshift did. So for those of you who still have your Kinect camera you can try it out, if it works for you it is only $79.

Faceware at full retail is about the same as doing a full neuron setup and the plugin so it isn't super crazy though definitely not hobbyist or toying around pricing. They are actually pretty cheap compared to a lot of their competition and is a very solid markerless system that can use just about any video source. Considering the current characters include the default Faceware blendshape set, plus a bunch more the time savings of having a push button solution might make up for any price difference. 

Intel Realsense cameras include face tracking and you can tie into the SDK to roll your own. 

There is a lot more going on to face tracking though than just feature tracking. They usually tie into a FACS or FACS type database and use machine learning algorithms for matching to the correct FACS pose (blendshape selection and strength of selection) then a retargeting system to apply that to your character. It is actually quite a bit more complicated than body tracking.

It is a real shame Faceshift is gone, it was pretty reasonable and worked great. Once Apple snatched it up it was impossible to get ahold of. Hao Li's new research looks promising though. 



Free Range
My IMDB

We discussed some time ago, and I believe the consensus was the f-clone is not a viable alternative.

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Wait -- this product was created 4 YEARS AGO, and is called f-clone and doesn't work with iClone?  Hmmm, RL's lawyers ought to at the very least look into copyright name infringement (it's a bit too on the money).

And am I the only one who wonders why in heck, in four years, no one at that company (or elsewhere) tried to get it to work directly with iClone.  I can understand at least one reason -- the head morphs/bones/whatever might not have been extensive enough until around iClone 6, but they easily match anything needed now in 7 and CC 2.0.  

I guess one thing is for sure -- if the RL stuff comes in at an insane price tag, as some are insinuating, at least there might be a viable alternate (even if it requires more cleanup and a convoluted pipeline -- what, bring it into Maya with an exported CC head and then imported back in?  What other approach could be done to directly animate CC characters?)

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Alienware Aurora R16, Win 11, i9-149000KF, 3.20GHz CPU, 64GB RAM, RTX 4090 (24GB), Samsung 870 Pro 8TB, Gen3 MVNe M-2 SSD, 4TBx2, 39" Alienware Widescreen Monitor
Mike "ex-genius" Kelley

Ignore last posts found these pages will take a look. - http://f-clone.com/how-to-use-f-clone

I dont get if this is a working commercial package or something that is redundant just to play with? Ideally I'm looking for a package that will take custom avatars and be able to animate the heads in realtime.  I notice it was developed in Unity which I use but can't find any contact or support info? Anyone any wiser? Thanks

I dont get if this is a working commercial package or something that is redundant just to play with? Ideally I'm looking for a package that will take custom avatars and be able to animate the heads in realtime.  I notice it was developed in Unity which I use but can't find any contact or support info? Anyone any wiser? Thanks

Did the Kinect  work any better for you? Also I'm wondering if the eyes are tracked as well.

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It is sort of working here, but only head rotation works, I might install my Kinect and see if it does better, you really need clean and well lit video with a webcam, tried it last night in bad lighting and the video capture was very flickery, the Kinect might solve that!

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The program starts for me, but then gets stuck at the initial window; clicking Next has no effect.

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