Animated Emojis in Unity?

I am worried about animated emojis on iPhone. Soon everyone will be able to easily make animated 3D characters.

I need to be able to at least keep up with them.

Is there some technology that you can use this face-tracking technology to make animated characters to import into Unity?

 

Chasing trends is problematic because by the time it has become widespread it is already obsolete.

https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/fall2017/601/

 

It is good to be aware of changes and think about diversification of our skills for the future.

 

I don't want to make a face-tracking app as such.

But I want to be able to quickly animate 3D characters faces. And if everyone and their dog can do it on an iPhone. Whose going go want to buy my games?

Or to put it another way. If 3D animated faces become the norm. Any game without an animated 3D face in it will look very dated!

That's why I'm hoping there's a way to use this technology to animate faces and import them into Unity.

If you're not ahead of the trend then you're behind the trend and that's not good!

 

Yeah, Mixamo have (or had?) a thing where you can use a web cam to animate faces rigged with their tool, I think directly into Unity.

 

Yea, there many solutions for capturing/creating facial animation, has been for years. You’re already “behind the curve” if it’s something you needed and don’t have a solution.

I’ve seen a few tools that use this as a capture tool, the data it captures is pretty specific but can be translated. But there are better solutions for games already. I’m not sure this is going to change much. (For games, at least, maybe for chat/social media type applications)

 

like?

 

Literally tons. Faceware, f-clone (has unity support), Blender (markers), moviemotion, nevronmotion, etc.. There are many, many facial capture solutions, from high end to markerless using a webcam or kinect. I remember playing with one for papervision (flash) and webcam about a decade ago (not markerless).

Even facial recognition for security isn't new, there are open source projects for that. What apple did was make it really fast, dedicated hardware and put it on phone.

Heck, there are even some on asset store:
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/92023
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/59972
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/25392

 

Cool. I will check them out. I know these things exist. But I think that the ease of use of the new iPhone emojis will be a game changer.

 

I'm pretty sure it's a toy "solution" (in need of a problem?) driving a handful of specially crafted parameters. Polished but probably not exciting if you look behind the curtain.

Besides, not sure how much facial animation you need for performance capture to win over more manual methods of driving shape keys.

 

Indeed. The big deal with it, that is built into a phone and used for auth. For the much less than the price of an iPhone, you can set up a professional level rig. Much less, in fact. And use software designed for face cap that works directly with unity. (And everything else). And as you said, things like shape keys are much more practical and efficient in most cases. If you need higher quality (performance) capture, you can do much better than iPhone, much cheaper and easier.