The Very Simple Reason that Facial Motion Capture is Terrible

I have seen a lot of different research videos and papers on the topic of facial performance capture.  They put any number of markers on a face, video the markers with cameras  and they create a 3d mesh out of all of this data.

And than usually the results look smooth but ugly.  And not really acting that you would want to spend much time watching.

And often, going through this research, you will find images like this.


I've been drawing faces a lot lately, really simple faces.  Really expressive faces.  And you know what I always make sure to get right, even if everything else isn't great?  I always go for the eyes.  And than the mouth, and then the eye brows and maybe the nose.  And usually after that, the point and emotion of the drawing is pretty obvious.

So I look at these performance capture technologies and the first and most obvious thing that they don't capture is the eye.  And it isn't just the rotational position of the eye that is important to capture, it is the white space around the eye.

It's about the amount of the iris and pupil that is visible, the shape that cuts it off and the white space that surrounds it.

If you are to translate a performance capture onto a digital character, it is not the amount of rotation of the eye in the socket that must be transferred, it is the end result of that rotation that makes an image that we as humans with advanced facial recognition abilities can interpret that must be captured and transferred.

Human facial recognition is good, but it has been tricked by drawings for a long time.  It is just a matter on focusing on the important parts and letting everything else fall to the side.

Kyler

Wright Brother's Model

 

 I started building this model a few months ago and finally figured out how to finish it and present it.  I have a new-found respect for model builders who take model building to a whole different level of finish and detail.

Happy Father's and Mother's Day

My parents have come to visit in Montreal. I made them an animated card using my character from last year.

Made on my new tablet computer with TVpaint software. It feels a lot like using a magic animation lightable with magic paper.

Kyler

The Summit Poster

Drawing but different

I've been doing a lot of drawing. I'm trying to get a character designed for a game for Mory. It requires a female main characte

Character design is always difficult, and drawing faces is difficult and a giant hurdle that I don't felt I have ever really gotten over is drawing female faces and really understand what makes them female.

So this is just a big pile of female face and face drawing research that I have been doing.

Now there is something special about these drawings. They look like pencil but the aren't.

I just graduated from school and received as a graduation gift an Asus Ep121 tablet computer. It has a wacom pen built into the screen so that I can draw directly on it with pressure sensitivity and very precise line work.

I am really loving it. I don't feel at all hindred by the tablet anymore. I'm still working on getting some really good animation software for it, but I have use a trial of TVpaint and it is going to be great to create 2d animation on.

Kyler

Illusion

I am very enamoured by illusions.

Whenever I find a new one, I am intensely interested in it.

My most recent find was mime.  This video is quite incredible.

Tug of War from Karen Montanaro on Vimeo.

I ended up buying the dvd set because everything he is talking about is utterly related to animation.  It arrived today and I already learned a lot from the first hour.

But back to illusions.  I've been interested in animation, the illusion of movement, optical illusions, magic eye 3d illusions, magic tricks, card tricks, video games, computer graphics, binaural sound recording, motion tracking, stop motion, photosynths, high realism drawing and painting, virtual reality,  and probably a number of other things.

I'm pretty sure that I don't just like fake things, it's that I like knowing how to directly communicate to our perceptual systems.  This fantastic mime has stripped away everything but the bare essentials parts of what he is trying to communicate, which is a tug of war.

Every illusion is actually the result of a deep understanding.

Kyler

Inside Job

I just watched the Inside Job, a film that explains the root causes of the financial meltdown in the last few years.

Out of that comes a discussion of money and wealth.  There are all sorts of people getting millions dollar bonus, moving billions of dollars around.  And a lot of the time, it feels like people are saying that if a banker got 150 million dollar bonus that money should be going directly to some average working class people.  It should just be divided up and given around.  In the film, a number like 150 million dollars was compared to 18 000 dollars that elderly were being paid from a pension fund.

And this type of math makes everything feel insane.

But I think there is something weird going on.  I don't really think that one banker having 150 million dollars is the same thing as 150 people having a million dollars each, or 1500 people having 100 000 dollars.

The question I am asking is where did the bankers 150 million dollars come from?  Did it actually come from hard working people, or was it simply withdrawn from other mysterious investments inside the bank?  And what did the banker do with 150 million dollars.  I have a feeling it went right back into some sort of investment.

And the thing with investments is that you can't really take all of you money out of them.  Suppose all of the bankers with 150 million dollars suddenly wanted to spend all of that money.  They would need to sell all of there investments, the market would be flooded and the end value of what they actually had would be dramatically reduced.

So in fact while all sorts of bank statements and computers might say that there are millions and billions of dollars moving around in the bank accounts of a minor top percentage of the world,  I have a feeling that that money is tied up, and simply could not be let forth into the world.  And money that can't be used doesn't really have much value.

The bankers did do something wrong with how they were practicing economics, but I don't believe that the numbers that they are telling us have anything to do with the actual amount of value which they stole from the world, though they did a really good job of mucking up how everything and everyone else in the world thinks about value.

I guess value is the real mystery.  I will have to think more about what is money and what is value and what they mean.