Facial Motion Capture:

This goes way beyond simple 3d object scanning.

Man’s need and obsession to recreate the human face, has extended all the back to Egyptian art and beyond. First to record the likeness of kings and queens, and now to give ants and bears humanlike speech patterns and facial experiences. With today’s technological ability to animate humans, and to anthropomorphic creatures and objects, there is a growing need to be able to quickly and accurately capture the motions of the face, to be further used to superimpose over a computer generated character.

Typically, facial motion capture has for the most part, received it biggest support, from the computer gaming industry, but now there is an every increasing interest in the movie special effects, and animation studios. But other more practical applications for this technology are in practice as well. The use of facial motion capture for speech analysis, facial damage and rehabilitation, and the more technical future developments of facial recognition and security clearance.

There is a marketable difference between facial motion capture, and body motion capture. With body motion capture, the idea is to capture the movements of a structured bone framework, with the fluidity of an actual human moving. This can be done at various speeds, horizontal and vertical alignments, and various ranges of depth and width of an area. Facial motion capture on the other hand has different demands and approaches. The idea of targeting just the face, is so that a wider range of movements, expressions, and other more lifelike nuances can be captured, instead of just bulky generic movements. With facial motion capture, the human face needs to be confined in a relatively small area, so that the recording equipment can track and record the facial movements, without experiencing occlusion (the erroneous data received, when a reflective markers becomes "hidden" from an obscuring object.) Also since the face is primarily composed of skin and muscle interlaced over a fixed skull bone structure, there is no need for bulky electro-mechanical or cumbersome magnetic recording setups. The most practical methods are optical recordings, given their small size, lightness, and affordability.

Meta Motion offers the AVSoft FT2000 face tracker for performance animation and facial tracking for less than $7000.

Meta Motion offers proFACE using reflective markers applied to the face and recorded with proFACE. (see a short video example) for about $5000

Puppet Works produces Face Works.

Eyematic FaceStation Version 2 for 3ds max™ and Maya® for $1,995. A totally digital approach to facial capturing (see a short video)

Moon Crescent Studios has developed Shape Snatcher (not currently open to public)

And exciting new way of projecting white lines across a subject and recording the deviations.

Facial motion capture and editing in action. (see short video)

Reflected marker video. (see short video)

Animated facial motion of above woman. (see short video)

Ultimate 3d Links a great resource of many 3d manufactures, companies, free 3d rendered objects and more.