Re-Face! - Blender Facial Mocap Retargeting Made Easy

Re-Face is a Blender addon containing a set of tools for transferring facial motion capture, or "mocap", to your character's facial rig. Re-Face is super easy to use, and it equips your character animation utility belt with some nifty gadgets designed to get your characters talking and expressing themselves in no time - by using your own facial expressions!

What does it do?

Simply put, it makes your character's face move like your face! Re-Face takes your existing motion capture data and applies it to an existing facial rig. You can choose to:

retarget animated facial markers to a bone-based facial rig, or
create facial shape key drivers using the animated shape keys or bone rotations via data imported from other software.

What does it not do?

Re-Face is not used to generate motion capture data. For this process, you will need to use Blender's native tracking tools on your footage, or capture facial motion in external software, such as Brekel Pro Face.

Why do I need it?

Facial motion capture technology and its usage in films and games is on the rise. And why not? The turnaround time for facial animation is much shorter, it can look very convincing, and it's a lot of fun to use your own face to animate characters. And Blender has everything you need to use facial mocap in your project. But have you tried to retarget all of this by hand? One word: "fuhgeddaboudit." It's not totally impossible, but it is very tedious and time-consuming. Enter Re-Face! Re-Face is designed not only to make it possible to get mocap data on to your character's face, but also to drastically speed up that process. It accomplishes this by automating all the ridiculously repetitive tasks involved (goodbye, carpal tunnel syndrome!), and by making certain impossible tasks possible.

Re-Face! is for anyone who:

Needs to get facial animation done under a tight deadline. Get it done fast with Re-Face!
Needs to composite characters with convincing facial animation into live action footage, and traditional facial animation techniques just aren't cutting it.
Just generally wants or needs realistic and convincing facial movements for a CG project.
Has a firm grasp of rigging fundamentals and how armatures are used in Blender.

New Features in v1.2

Facial rig generator for quick facial rigging with any humanoid character!
Graph editor driver creation tools for
- Shape keys
- Wrinkle maps (supports both Blender Internal and Cycles materials)

Features in v1.1

Facial motion extraction / stabilization tools for mocap data with head movements!
- Option to keep the original markers and create new stabilized markers, or apply stabilization to the original markers
- Automatic updating of the marker / bone list with new stabilized markers for faster retargeting
Graph Editor: F-curve smoothing tool for removing jitter from mocap data. Offers finer control over f-curve smoothing than Blender's native Smooth F-Curves tool
Graph Editor: Options to scale / smooth all or only selected types of f-curves
Bug fixes / UI clean-up and organization

Features in v1.0

Easy-to-use list for pairing tracking markers with facial rig bones
Bake tracking constraints down to animation on all tracking markers - at the push of a single button!
Quick renaming of selected markers, with optional prefix / suffix / numbering, for organizing and prepping your scene before binding mocap
Automatic scaling of mocap animation to match the scale of the rig
Option to constrain bones to tracking markers or simply copy mocap animation directly to the facial rig
Automatic constraining of bones to tracking markers
Graph editor tools for efficient tweaking of mocap animation (just in case the need ever arises!), including tools for:
- Scaling f-curves
- Inverting f-curves
- Hiding / showing specific f-curve types for faster visualization
- Deleting specific f-curve types to clean up the animation

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