Daniel Bardsley

From the Institute of Animation homepage:

“We have developed a set of specialized Maya-tools targeted at reducing the amount of tedious work associated with the setup process of high quality, animatable characters. The Adaptable Facial Setup is capable of driving any humanoid geometry, drawing from an extensive, FACS-based library of facial movement components.

The process of fitting the head skeleton to the individual geometry is simplified by offering a standard set of skin weights that accomodates the typical deformation regions of the face. Any skin weights may be cloned topology-independent from one head to another utilizing the Geometry Matching Tool. The Corrective Blendshape Manager offers a useful way to add subtle deformations to a skinned mesh. Blendshape targets can be created and edited, and are computed with respect to the bind pose of the skinned mesh.”

Check out the video below to see whats possible with this tool.
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ARToolkit is an excellent starting point for developing Augmented Reality applications. The demo applications are impressive right out of the box. You can download the toolkit from the ARToolkit homepage.

ARToolKit is a software library for building Augmented Reality (AR) applications. These are applications that involve the overlay of virtual imagery on the real world. For example, in the image to the right a three-dimensional virtual character appears standing on a real card. It can be seen by the user in the head set display they are wearing. When the user moves the card, the virtual character moves with it and appears attached to the real object.

Another useful tool for use in conjunction with ARToolkit is the ARGUI interface. Check out Lief Oppermanns page for more information and detailed install instructions (German).