PeCap W4 '24: Retargeting Eyes/Brows in Maya

This week we learnt how to parameterize the data to take it from Analyzer into Maya. Then it was time to take the data and put it into Retargeter for Maya. I downloaded the free trial for this one at home so that I can work on it more in depth.

I set up the face cam to match the measurements of the camera footage given to us by Dr. Kennedy.

With Faceware Retargeter installed, I could load the plugin from the plugin manager and get underway with my keying.

Now we move into assigning the face groups to the controls. I setup 3 face groups for the brows, eyes and mouth. Then I selected the correlated rig controls and added them to the face groups accordingly. It was important to only assign one face group to each individual control. Conveniently, they were already colour coded for easy assignment.

At this point I realised it would be best to remove the grid and change the background to make the controls easier to see. Then I imported the performance footage into the scene. I positioned it next to the controls like so.

I created layers from the selected face group controls like Dr. Kennedy suggested. This way I can toggle the visibility of the controls for each face group to ensure I'm only moving the right controls when working on the different areas of the face. It also means I can right click the layers to select all of a group's controls when keying instead of dragging to select them.

Then I began to key the poses on the most notable frames. I noted these down from the analyzer footage.

I also rotated the performance video in the scene slightly as the camera was not 100% parallel with her face and made it harder to analyse.

Muna was extremely expressive with her eyebrows while acting so they reach their maximum height quite a few times during the scene. I narrowed it down to 6 frames for the eyebrows.

I had 7 key poses which could probably be cut down later on. Retargeter needs at least 3 in order to successfully retarget the data.

Then I saved out a retarget file and did the same thing with the eyes.

For the eyes I ended up with 8 key poses.

Feedback from Dr Kennedy in Analyzer:

• slide the outer inner lip markers slightly closer to the corners so that there's more stretch to the lips

• make sure to drag back the inner lip markers back into place where they fall off.

During our class, Dr Kennedy shared some useful knowledge behind animation vs game rigs. I found this information really interesting as I didn't realise they were that different. It helped me to understand the technical process that you don't see while working with the rig.