Facial rig for motion capture

Support Animation and Rigging
#1

Hey, I want to know what is you exactly need to do to have a facial rig for motion capture. There are videos of youtube of poeple showing how to capture your face, or sending motiion capture information into blender but nothing talking about the actual rigs.

So, should I have a bone deformation driven rig or should I use shapekeys with drivers? I assume bone deformation rigs would be best right? Since the bone will be able to move more freely and compared to one moved by drivers which will have more binary like movements ot it.

And then how do I make those said bones move with the motion capture footage?

#2

You might want to take a look at the tutorial…HERE

#3

I’ve seen that. But there is very little information how to create the facial rig on an actual character. He is just showing how to make motion capture work with this specific setup.

#4

Well he started with an actual character and deleted parts of the mesh…just do as he does with whatever mesh you want to use…so you will have a complete character but are only working on the head in this case, so you could just hide everything in your mesh but the head, and you will have exactly what he is using. The face rig is the trackers combined with bones, using the python script he provides. This system doesn’t assign the face trackers to an existing armature/face rig.

#5

I don’t think you’re understand what I mean.

I have a custom built rig, and right now, I have several deforming bones that represent the faces muscles, and all of them are connected to controller bones which you use to manually create the character’s expression.

I need to know if this is correct for motion capture, or if I need another system. His method of just placing random bones over a face where movement will “probably” happen will result in very poor behaviour. This is why you never build character faces that way.

#6

@Pherion I think I understand what your saying I’m trying to figure out the same thing. I’m actually trying to setup motion capture live through my webcam and blender. I’m going to be doing mine by assigning bones to each one of the trackers.