Facial Capture Using Blender 3D

The latest version of Blender 3D was released recently and has a bunch of great new features. One of the most impressive is motion tracking, which enables you to reconstruct camera animation from video and film footage, and composite 3d rendered object into movie clips. The Blender community has been busy exploring the possibilities of this new feature and several people have been attempting to use it for rudimentary motion capture.

As you can see above and below, the results so far look pretty good!





If you're feeling ambitious and want to try this for yourself you can find a tutorial here.

I've always believed that Blender had the potential to become an ideal (and totally free) professional tool for creating digital puppetry. Although I don't believe that this works in real-time - I haven't had a chance to try it myself yet - this is a huge step in that direction and suggests that we can look forward to a lot more amazing things in the future.

Via BlenderNation.