client want´s to understand complex face rigging!?

[exhibitx]

I am no mean a professional about this since i'm still in school myself but as my understanding how this work is that facial markers are placed on a person's face to track movement of the facial muscles. Then those track data are then cleaned up to make sure all the marker are where it suppose to be and then you map those data onto a facial rig which facial robot is for. As for facial robot concern, it's just an automatic facial rig that speed up the process of placing joints on deform area and help with facial animation. I believe we can achieve the same thing with other packages such as maya, xsi etc... Hope this will get others with better knowledge to comment.

[theflash]

I don't know particularly of faces, but motion capture has a lot of steps you have to follow before and after capturing (calibrate, capture, generate skeleton, fit data, clean etc..). And I doubt if there is going to be simple few export import steps unless you are using ready tools like face robot.

[Dave_Hingley]

you are pretty correct about using facial markers. but once you have the data you can use it in different ways

the easiest way is to have the facial markers control clusters/bones on the mesh using position constraints. however the markers must match and not move - i would put 3 markers on the head and use them to extract the head motion using a rigid body

the other way is to analyse the position of the markers in relation to each other in extreme poses and work out a minimum and maximum value for each marker which can then be expressed as a value between -1 and 1 with 0 being a relaxed point in the middle you can then process this data and use it to drive a rig base on sliders - more complicated but reusable and not dependant on the markers matching the position of the clusters

in any case for good facial mocap you need incredibly good data with nearly no occlusions and be capable of recording high frequency data ( try blowing a raspberry - you shold be able to see the markers all the time) . A few years ago i had a set up of 18 cameras which could record 50 markers hardly a frame (even getting the eyes opening and closing) - it took a while to set up and we still had problems with removing the head motion - the 3 markers worked to an extent but their positions where affected by the jaw muscles.

I liked the face robot demos but we only ever saw the final result on a styalised face. I would like to see the same information applied to a number of different heads and a realistically proportioned face

[PentamiterBeast]

http://softimage.wiki.softimage.com/index.php/Category:FaceRobot

[SandeepMaithani]

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/pc/index?siteID=123112&id=13571400#channels_What%E2%80%99s%20New

hope this helps

[theflatlander]

PentamiterBeast - thanks alot for the link, that really helped me alot!=)

sandy_maith - thanks to you too, even though I´ve already seen that one, and they don´t explain much about the data-transfering, it´s more the plugin in action!

[wakkamis]

Here is another link on some pretty nice face animation.
http://www.image-metrics.com/project/emily-project

[GreatFurnace]

I think the best way to approach the situation is explain how facial muscles work. Like, if you smile, know what muscles are expanding and contracting. By knowing that, you can understand where to put the markers and how to use that information.

Good luck

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