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).

Originally a system for merging range data from 3D Scanners. I modified this software and hijacked its ICP algorithms for use in a 3D face recognition system. An excellent bit of software with a highly customisable interface and a powerful scripting language.

Visit the Scanalyze homepage
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An excellent and fully featured computer vision library. OpenCV (Open Source Computer Vision) is a library of programming functions mainly aimed at real time computer vision.

Example applications of the OpenCV library are Human-Computer Interaction (HCI); Object Identification, Segmentation and Recognition; Face Recognition; Gesture Recognition; Motion Tracking, Ego Motion, Motion Understanding; Structure From Motion (SFM); and Mobile Robotics.

OpenCV sourceforge site
OpenCV Wiki
OpenCV Yahoo group

Xface is an open source toolkit implementing the MPEG-4 standard for facial animation.

Visit the Xface homepage

Main Features:

* Accepts MPEG-4 FAP files and SMIL-Agent scripts as input.
* Supports muscle based deformation (for MPEG-4) and keyframe based animation using morph targets.
* Muscle deformation methods/rules can be extended easily.
* Blending of visemes (visual phonemes), emotions, expressions.
* Head and eye movements (random and controlled).
* Can use various TTS engines using the pluggable factory mechanism.
* Control over TCP/IP. XfacePlayer can be controlled using any programming language thanks to our messaging system.
* Save animation as video in avi format.
* Platform independent code. (We distribute only windows version, however people reported compiling it under Linux successfully)
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