Industrial Light & Magic utilized facial capture technology on a massive scale to bring more than two dozen computer-generated characters to life in the new Warcraft, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Star Wars films. Here we present our flexible proprietary facial capture system which was used to faithfully translate all the subtle nuances, lip movements, and saccades of over 1200 facial performances onto editable, artist-friendly animation rigs, and ultimately the big screen.
Human beings are naturally sensitive to subtle cues in facial expressions, especially in areas of the eyes and mouth. Current facial motion capture methods fail to accurately reproduce motions in those areas due to multiple limitations. In this paper, we present a new performance capture method that focuses on the perceptually important contour features on the face. Additionally, the output of our two-step optimization scheme is also easily editable by an animator. To illustrate the strength of our system, we present a retargeting application that incorporates primary contour lines to map a performance with lip-sync from an actor to a creature.