it is confusing!
Motion Live is 'free' it should be builtin with iClone (previously was a paid plugin?). It actually allows lots of 'free' connections like to knobs on a midi controller (and a lot more if you can script it...)The 'profile' for iPhone costs $200, and there's a free companion app on iPhone app store. It is specifically for ios devices that can run Apple's ARKit blendshapes. Apple has a lock on this feature because they have patents surrounding face recognition security. It is their ARKit that translates face expressions into the blendshape data (something the iPhone does already, so it was not difficult for RL and others to tap into for mocap software) and iPhone has onboard acceleration chip specifically for that face recognition. (it is more than just iPhones, somewhere there is a compatibility chart with a few iPads and at least one recent low-end iPhone without face recognition...)
It's not likely that Android will get this feature of hardware boost. I have seen someone run opensource github stuff on a very expensive Android but it was not a commercial product.
there is also a different paid 'profile' that works with a specific webcam software (Faceware RT). It is a bajillion dollars for some unfathomable reason. I think that company has a headmount solution so the price is more for industry animators.
(iPhone is a consumer device that people buy anyway as a phone, so just a much larger userbase helps drive down the price)
$200 is still expensive, but it is a 1-time purchase. (I've seen face mocap that is essentially the same, just streaming data off an iPhone for a monthly subscription)….
Also check in the Marketplace, there is a plugin for Dollars Mocap which is vTubing software – plugin is free(?) but Dollars Mocap is like ninety-nine dollars, so still quite a few dollars, hahaha. I think it is not as good as iPhone but does offer some body capture from Camera). Dollars allows using video clips instead of a live camera.
When I livestream into Unity I use an app called 'Face Cap' (also paid, no affiliation to me or RL) also works in Blender.
imo the Motion Live system inside iClone is really good, they made it so anyone could make a plugin for RL and control all sorts of stuff in the scene, but it is really for recording mocap into iClone. In the Eye Blink video above, you can see a quick capture of the iClone desktop at around 12min, just before the avatar comes back at the end. This was a live screencapture, but the quality would be even higher if I'd recorded in iClone timeline and then rendered out frame-by-frame.
iClone allows you to mix the iPhone mocap with other mocap/animations. If you use AI voices, you can have Acculips do the automatic lipsync, and then record your eyes and brows being expressive to that voice (and Acculips' mouth visemes). Also you can over-drive certain blendshapes and underdrive others, for instance a cartoon character's mouth could open wider than your real mouth…, my real eyebrows go higher than the iPhone allows but in iClone I can lower the strength so they don't clip and hit maximum all the time. I also tend to squint, and iClone has a SET ZERO POSE so I hit that button while squinting and then as I record there is no squinting on the figure…. It's a nice system overall.
iPhone is best/easiest/cheapest face mocap solution. I captured that video on an iPhoneX which is probably very cheap by now 2nd hand… (It has fallen behind and is not supported anymore by newer ios software). There is no reason to wait for Android to get a niche feature some year in the future when the patents run out. Apple does not benefit when you buy a used iPhone that does this one thing really well. There is no cheaper solution that comes close to this quality (not 'Hollywood quality', but good quality and very easy, and very affordable, and a whole ecosystem of stands and mounts...).
I very recommend buying a used iPhone and just mounting it on your desk between a couple youtube lights to balance the shadows. Facial mocap is always ready (some minor fuss with your local wifi address that you have to type into iClone). All your CC3+ figures are compatible. A lot of new iClone 'characters' are also compatible (they will say they have face blendshapes). And Character Creator allows us to set up blendshaes on 3rd-party or original figures...
Edited
Last Year by
wetcircuit