Week 4

 Retargeter - brows & eyes posing:

The task for this week was rather casual, just simply posing the brows and eyes for the Faceware Retargeter. I did want to see how they would move using the tracking data but not really sure if there's any additional setup with Dr. Kennedy's process. So better leave it for next week.

Dr. Kennedy pointed out that the brow position between the neutral frame and frame 1 should be similar and mine was raised too much. This will affect the program calculation when doing the retargeting process.

He explained that it could be the actress's head looking downwards that resulted in more movements shown in the footage than there really was in the expression.

Another problem he pointed out was to be careful about how much the pupil was actually showing. For example in the image above, both lower eyelids should be raised a bit upwards to better resemble the pupil shape in the reference footage. The mindset I had when working on posing the eyes would result in the uncanny valley effect, as the eyes feel more open even though the eyelid position was mostly correct. the pupil shape should be the priority when posing the eye expression.

Reflection:

Had a conversation with Dr. Kennedy regarding the mindset I should use for motion capture. He said that despite the mindset being really similar to animation, I should focus more on resembling the "feel" of the reference. As the Meta human model won't 100% resemble the actress in real life. So we need to ensure the animation captures the "feeling" instead of simply resembling every facial feature position.