Adobe's Project Animal

[Rodney]

http://premiereclip.adobe.com/videos/GwoAtou7EY5

 

I have no other information on this but realtime facial motion capture is always going to be a useful thing.

I suppose the real trick would be to export the captured data for usage elsewhere (such as in A:M).

 

For those of you that use Adobe CC, they are accepting signup for beta testing.

 

DIsclaimer: The video was taken by an audience member so the audio is pretty rough.

 

Here's a bit more from their site:

 

...the Advanced Product Development team who work closely with the After Effects team has been working on a character animation product code-named Project Animal. While your character is the puppet, you are the one holding the strings. By accessing your computer’s webcam, Project Animal will track the movement of your head, mouth, and eyes—including your blinking, glancing, and eye-brow raising—and move your puppet accordingly. When you talk, your character talks. When you feign surprise, so does your character. When you’re grumpy, your character is too.

Project Animal is for two different types of After Effects artists: those who want to rig complex characters without creating a confusing tangle of expressions, and those who just want to create simple characters easily. Either way, once the character is set up, bringing it to life is just a matter of acting out your performance in front of your webcam.

The workflow starts with importing layered Illustrator or Photoshop files. If the layers are named to indicate which body part they correspond to, then there’s no further rigging required – you can immediately control your puppet with your face.

This relates to something I was trying to set up in A:M a few years ago. Not facial capture from a webcam... that is way beyond me... but driving bones/motion via Group Names, which is something A:M almost does already as Named Groups can correspond to CP assignment with bones. As I'm no programmer I left off when I ran up against the need to automate the process of programatically assigning those Grouped Names to Bones. In short, I wasn't up to doing the actual work.

[pixelplucker]

Of course Adobe can't just post a flash encoded or Vimeo clip but came up with another plugin to view content. Typical...

Horrid company, if hostile take overs weren't possible they would have gone out of business a decade ago.