Kinect pioneer releases new facial mocap demo
Jasper Brekelmans has posted a (literally) eye-catching tech demo of a new markerless facial mocap system.
Although Brekelmans is probably best known to the CG community for his Brekel Kinect software for recording motion data with Microsoft’s Kinect game peripheral, the current demo is part of his day job as a TD at The Netherlands’ Motek Entertainment.
The system extracts facial movements from visible or infrared video footage taken with a lightweight head-mounted camera and retargets to a bone-based facial rig, or to blendshapes.
Although the system can capture at 30, 60 or 120fps, Brekelmans says that professional-quality data really requires frame rates of 60fps or above.
The system is based on a facial tracker developed by France’s Dynamixyz. Motek is working on Maya integration, rigging and retargeting, and is currently “looking into offering the technology commercially”.
The video prompted an interesting discussion on CGTalk between Brekelmans and Tamas Varga, lead modeller at Digic Pictures, which you can read via the link below.