Animation for iPhone X: automatic blendshapes & rig generation for ARKit Facial Animation

Hi everyone,

Polywink has announced a new service, Animation for iPhone X to make animations using the iPhone X's Face Tracking and the ARKit Unity Plugin even faster and easier! This service automatically generates a rig of 51 blendshapes to animate a character with the iPhone X.

The goal is to enable new, faster and cheaper animation workflows by allowing anyone to simply upload a static 3D head model and get it back with a rig of 51 blendshapes perfectly adapted to its morphology and topology, compliant with ARKit documentation.

Each model is delivered within 24 hours, ready for face tracking animation. You can animate any character or even create your own animojis, and use an app like Face Cap or your own scripts to export your animations.

Check out the video for more info, or head directly to: https://www.polywink.com/15-56-animation-for-iphone-x.html

Cheers!

 

You guys offer the rigging service too. Is that also compatible with iPhoneX face tracking??

 

Hi GookGo,

If you want to use the iPhone X captured animations, then you have to use the same set of blendshapes (for example in Maya). Our rigging service "Rig on Demand" works with another, more complete set of blendshapes (more than 250 instead of 51) so the two are not compatible on the go and would require some tweaking to work together.

However, we're currently developing a rig compatible with Animation for iPhone X so that you can directly import your animation in Maya and tweak it to your liking with a full facial rig! This solution should be out in the next couple of weeks.

What you can do in the meantime is use the iPhone X set of blendshapes to create your own rig though it would be of course more time consuming.

If you want to know more, don't hesitate to reach out directly through our website or Facebook page!

 

Hi. Our Studio ordered 52 BlendShapes Package for iPhone X from Polywink. They look really good !!! I saw only a Unreal-Tutorial how to deal with it. So, does anybody has experience with the Unity version ? We now have the BlendShapes, but what are the next steps ... ? Would be great if someone can share infos / links ! Thx.

 

Hi sledgeman. Our Studio also want to odder some BlendShapes from Polywink. I want to know wether your ordered BlendShapses are very good. Your Model is Human-like or cartoon. Can you show me your models? If It is inconvenient to send Models, can you show me some ScreenShots, like Jaw_Open, Eye_Blink and so on. Thank you very much. My email is ayangdanny@foxmail.com

 

Hey, cant do that actually, because project isn´t ready yet and so its not public. But it isn´t something special. Its a toony humanoid character. What is important, i experienced :

- take care your character has a 100% symmetry
- don´t put hair on it, because face-expressions just need the face
- separate head and body. You need to send only the head (with the neck)
- Your Head should have: a) eyeballs separated b) teeth separated c) tongue separated d) etc.
- Afterwards you merge the head with the body it was detached from

Thats it so far. You can prove / check if all expressions from polywink are correct by going toe the apple site:
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/arkit/arfaceanchor/blendshapelocation
Click on the blendShape-name link and you will get a info picture how the expression should look like. Hope it helps you.