Hi,

I decided to make a facial mocap experiment with a pre-recorded speaker. I downloaded a clip from a scientist on Youtube, transferred it to a PNG sequence and let it rip. I made very little modifications. The clip was a 24fps, but it still seems to work. What do you think?

If anybody is interested in collaborating, let me know here or PM me.




My latest movie THE GOLDEN MAN, and a few others: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIl1EqVCKitZzLqaNnLK0BA

Hey, that's pretty good.

It looks like it could use some smoothing, since sometimes the lips seem to jump from one frame to the next (like a step function).  For example, at 0:10 when he says, "is" as part of "is reality."   But for "very little modification" it looks pretty good.  The face turned out well.

As for collaboration, I can attest to it being a viable concept, and I will keep you on my list of potential collaborators.

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iClone 7... Character Creator... Substance Designer/Painter... Blender... Audacity...
Desktop (homebuilt) - Windows 10, Ryzen 9 3900x CPU, GTX 1080 GPU (8GB), 32GB RAM, Asus X570 Pro motherboard, 2TB SSD, terabytes of disk space, dual  monitors.
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EXCELLENT character - fantastic job on the MOCAP there! 4 stars  ~V~

       Val RogueAnanda

Thanks, guys! I think a very important thing is calibration. For the example above, I'm not sure if I could calibrate the face correctly because I didn't have the required 2 seconds of neutral face with the mouth slightly open.

I've been reading older posts, and I'm not sure if anybody could do animations as good as Faceware by hand. Not only would it take an inordinate amount of time, but the artist who does facial animation by hand, while he could reproduce expressions, would never quite get the TIMING right, IMO.


My latest movie THE GOLDEN MAN, and a few others: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIl1EqVCKitZzLqaNnLK0BA

Remember that you can use a virtual webcam to pause your video capture and get that required amount of stable face pose to calibrate it properly.

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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

Argus - I have yet to use the FW, but I know if you use other RL products that I have such as Crazy Talk 2, 3A, 6, 7, & 8 all have facial expressions that cross over to iClone. Since CT 7, & 8 are basically only avatars from the neck up, that's about all they have, but it's handy to cross them over for those who need more face action, have the other products, but haven't the FW plug-in yet.  ~V~

       Val RogueAnanda

To create a neutral position, I have taken one frame that looked sufficiently "neutral" and repeated it for one or two seconds at the beginning of my clip.

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Thanks, guys!

Another facial capture test. This time, I made a one-second still of the character's face and I put it at the beginning of the sequence so I could make a good calibration. Much better! 

I made very little modifications. All I did was eliminate a few superfluous  frames towards the middle (with face key) and add a general idle body motion for the sake of realism.

The original clip on Youtube which I captured with Faceware is of Elon Musk  talking about Steve Jobs.







My latest movie THE GOLDEN MAN, and a few others: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIl1EqVCKitZzLqaNnLK0BA

I'd like to say that overall the results of the Faceware app and the iClone plugin are pretty satisfactory. I hired five actors and recorded their voices and facial expressions through the Internet in the last couple months and all turned out pretty good. See the example clip below. Of course, it doesn't have the quality of films like Avatar and games like Last of Us and LA noire, but these folks spend millions of dollars on their product. For $700, and the price of a webcam (if you don't already have one). I get almost professional results and the actors don't even have to come to my home or studio! A dream come true... Faceware rocks!








My latest movie THE GOLDEN MAN, and a few others: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIl1EqVCKitZzLqaNnLK0BA

Argus, I get an video unavailable error message...

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