Capturing a person's facial expressions and transferring them to a virtual character is a very serious problem among special effects specialists and video game developers. It seems that the release of the FaceRig application will make life easier for novice directors and developers.
There are several ways to transfer human facial expressions to 3D characters in movies and games. The first and most time consuming method is to film a person on video, and then manually transfer each of his emotions and movement of individual muscles to the virtual character almost frame by frame. In the end, you can get as an acceptable result, and complete nonsense, very far from realistic. This method has been used in many old three-dimensional games, and now the results of this technique look on the screen, to put it mildly, absurdly.
The second method, which is now actively used in many cinema and gaming studios, is to glue to the face of the actor special tiny balls-markers, painted in a bright color. During the performance of a particular scene, the actor is shot at several angles by several cameras. The movement of the balls is tracked at each moment in time and recorded in the computer memory. Later, these records are converted in special applications and impose on the 3D-face of a virtual character, who immediately begins to mimic the actor who performed his role. This technique is used, for example, by the employees of the French studio Quantic Dreams, who gave us the games Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls. In the last game, the sensors had to be pasted over by Hollywood actors Helen Page and Willem Dafoe in order to accurately depict their characters during the gameplay.
There is a variation of the second mode of motion capture that director James Cameron uses. A helmet is worn on the actor, to which is attached a camera aimed at his face. Instead of balls, special colored dots are applied to the face, and the camera, due to the small distance and high accuracy of motion capture, conveys mimicry much more realistically. But this method is at the same time the most expensive in the industry, and not every game developer or novice director can afford it.
Much more accessible seems to be the increasing trend of capturing the actors' mimicry by means available to anyone. Some have already adapted the Kinect sensor, which is an accessory to the Xbox 360 gaming console.
This goal was set by software developers from Romania. At the moment, they are already testing a working build of the FaceRig application, which is able to transfer human emotions and facial expressions to a virtual character using a normal webcam. So far, the application works only with characters that were created by the developers themselves, but in the very near future they promised to introduce support for importing 3D models from various editors.
This technology will definitely appeal to thousands of indie developers from around the world, as this is the cheapest and very high-quality way to capture movements, with which you can revive your characters on the screen. The creators of the application see the application of their offspring not only in the world of video games. With the help of FaceRig, users who want to remain anonymous will be able to animate their three-dimensional avatars on social networks, services like Skype and so on.
At the moment, the developers of FaceRig are collecting $ 120,000 for the final stage of developing their application. You can also participate and their own ruble. For only $ 5 you will get early access to the beta version of the application, which will become full after the final release.
The article is based on materials .
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