PeCap W7 '24: Mouth Retargeting

This was the final week before semester break, in which I was feeling slightly behind already. Our lecture was an overview and tutorial on the clean up process. We will be using the graph editor which I feel relatively confident using after using it during my animation work. I will make a separate blog post on the cleanup process and my final result for the facial performance capture.

I found this week a bit challenging to get started on my PeCap work because I was unmotivated after the results of my mouth posing. I think that the amount of controls increased the amount of work, thus I was rushing through it to meet my predetermined deadlines and last week's work reflected that. Since then I have taken an adequate break from staring at Muna's digital head and I felt more interested in giving it another shot this week.

After my first round of posing I ended up with 19 frames of poses. After careful considerations and tweaks, I end the second round with 32 frames.

Dr Kennedy gave me some helpful advice when glancing over my posing quickly in class - utilise the mouth corner controls and analyse how flat the upper lip is to get the shape correct (something I believe I still need to work on).

The most challenging pose I worked on was the pursed lips when making an 'F' sound. I assumed that the answer was to use the funnel controls, however this curved the lip up and out into a semi circle instead of into the bow shape I was looking for. Eventually I worked out that I could achieve this shape by setting the mouth corners higher, dropping the funnel almost completely to 0 and messing with the push and pull/ toward controls.

I think my poses have become a lot more accurate than last weeks.

I find I work best at home so it was a relief to get the retargeting done to a point I was happy with when my Faceware Retargeter trial was about to end.

Here's a video of my progress so far with the mouth retargeted. There's still so much jitter from the lip balm at the beginning and end. No doubt when I begin cleaning it up there will be more tweaks to add in.