Week 2 - Brow and Eye Tracking

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 Phew! What a tricky week!

We jumped right into the facial tracking component of the performance capture process this week; beginning with tracking the brows and eyes.


 

In my scene, Miri's brows pull a variety of expressions - lifted high, settled low, and an anxious lifting of the tops. The tracker points on the eyebrow tails were placed on her temples and as a result were not visible for most of the shot, so I elected to track an eyebrow hair instead. It was a tricky and time consuming process.

The eyes were less challenging, though I am considering returning back to fine tune them after some feedback if possible. All trackers painted on were visible except for the upper eyelid, but I was able to apply trackers to the eyelash root on both eyelids and it seemed to work well. The main issue I encountered was that the upper eyelid felt like it moved side-to-side a lot and I genuinely couldn't tell if it was a result of the eyeball moving around a lot or due to a drifting tracker. This is something I will need to double check with my tutor before wrapping up work on this section. 

Luckily I was able to keep the number of key frames relatively low (around 15 for eyes) and the eyeball trackers weren't totally lost as she only blinks about 2 times throughout (a good portion of the section assigned has her staring straight and unblinking which was very helpful!) so I am hoping there will be less work to do on those later. I have been advised that eyes usually require full manual animations however.

Overall I think the tracking so far is acceptable. I would have preferred for it to be better but I think I lack the experience to know what needs to change and how to change it at this stage in my learning. I am glad this project will allow for us to pick at these small details though - it's nice to be able to intensely focus on the tiny movements and try to emulate as closely as possible with the references provided.

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I anticipate the mouth will be much more challenging...

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