Siggraph

Tomorrow 2:40 at the Vicon booth (1101), find out what one of Sony’s most prolific motion-capture veterans is doing with his facial capture product FacePro.

Hauck (Beowulf, Monster House, and Polar Express) and partner Steven Ilous (Polar Express) started Digital Concepts Group last year to address motion capture pipeline gaps, looking for ways to simplify various tasks. First up: facial capture.

As a plugin for the Vicon Blade system (and Motion Analysis), Face pro allows users to clean their data and get it onto the character effectively. “Stabilization is key,” Hausch says, “there are subtleties that are important enough to make a character look like a different person if you don’t stabilize.” The plugin also allows for easy retargeting, automated gap filling, and smart noise filtering. The Skinflex feature also builds on the mocap data to add the realism of skin roll, especially in the key mouth area, through procedural calculation of facial marker rotation (data not captured by the mocap system). “It turns a three-degree of freedom marker to a six-degree of freedom marker,” Hauck says. “So skin can roll across muscle and bone, instead of just sliding,” Ilous finishes.