Facial Animation Progress

The last few weeks I’ve been finishing the facial mocap for all the characters in the Mary and the Monster project. The work within the Faceware software is almost done, I only have 1 scene left for each of the characters. The work in the Faceware system has been slow and tedious. Some of the actors are tracked easily and I can finish processing their videos within a day but others can take multiple days. When we made the recordings, we had attached lights to the headsets to avoid drastic changes in the lighting on the actors’ faces and put makeup on them to give more contrast to their tracked features. These precautions definitely helped improve the facial captures but we ended up with the problems we did because the cameras kept shifting on the actors’ heads as they are moved through the scene. Still, with enough frames of the videos being keyframed, the software should be able to process the actors’ performances.