(no subject)
today i went to an all-day course on facial animation with motion capture. it went a little bit into the complex linear algebra that is used but for the most part i understood what was being talked about. it was pretty amazing though, how all these highly technical guys couldn't work their powerpoint presentations. of course powerpoint is dumb. a couple of the talks veered way too much into the area of company promos.
there were several very cool parts to this one. there was a bit of a history of motion capture, with shots of some of the early processes that were developed. there was a discussion of FACS, which is Facial Action Coding System. it was developed in the 70s by social scientists who wanted to find out if human facial expressions were consistent across cultures. their research showed that humans everywhere make expressions using the same muscles for the same reasons, suggesting that they are more innate than cultural. they broke down facial expressions into Action Units composed of certain muscle actions that are used to create facial expression. this kind of research helps science to do amusing things, like determine when people are lying through involuntary facial reactions, and to say whether a smile is genuine or forced. for animators it's a much bigger boon, because it breaks down the language of facial expression in a very scientific way, and with cg where the face is rigged in such a way that it can respond as though the muscles are actually there, it allows extremely naturalistic expressions to be developed.
another interesting thing is that industrial light and magic never uses facial motion capture. they do of course use video reference of the actors delivering their performances, but the facial motion is all key framed by their animators. the ilm guy showed a lot of footage of bill nighy without davy jones superimposed over him. there was also a significant amount of andy serkis doing his king kong thing, and a talk about the difficulties of coming up with a gorilla analogy to FACS, and using andy serkis' performance with a gorilla face. a lot of the gorillaness of king kong is just his brilliant acting, but there is definitely effects wizardry to the creation of king kong's face and mapping between the two.
the last speaker showed examples of facial motion capture for video games. there were examples of 'emotes' created out of actor's facial expressions, that are used a little bit in the tiger woods golf game. it's still not being used that widely in the video game industry, but the technologies are catching up fast.
there were several very cool parts to this one. there was a bit of a history of motion capture, with shots of some of the early processes that were developed. there was a discussion of FACS, which is Facial Action Coding System. it was developed in the 70s by social scientists who wanted to find out if human facial expressions were consistent across cultures. their research showed that humans everywhere make expressions using the same muscles for the same reasons, suggesting that they are more innate than cultural. they broke down facial expressions into Action Units composed of certain muscle actions that are used to create facial expression. this kind of research helps science to do amusing things, like determine when people are lying through involuntary facial reactions, and to say whether a smile is genuine or forced. for animators it's a much bigger boon, because it breaks down the language of facial expression in a very scientific way, and with cg where the face is rigged in such a way that it can respond as though the muscles are actually there, it allows extremely naturalistic expressions to be developed.
another interesting thing is that industrial light and magic never uses facial motion capture. they do of course use video reference of the actors delivering their performances, but the facial motion is all key framed by their animators. the ilm guy showed a lot of footage of bill nighy without davy jones superimposed over him. there was also a significant amount of andy serkis doing his king kong thing, and a talk about the difficulties of coming up with a gorilla analogy to FACS, and using andy serkis' performance with a gorilla face. a lot of the gorillaness of king kong is just his brilliant acting, but there is definitely effects wizardry to the creation of king kong's face and mapping between the two.
the last speaker showed examples of facial motion capture for video games. there were examples of 'emotes' created out of actor's facial expressions, that are used a little bit in the tiger woods golf game. it's still not being used that widely in the video game industry, but the technologies are catching up fast.