Lighting for the best motion capture

- Lighting for facial capture in Character Animator is simple but important. (jazzy music) Character Animator does an amazing job at capturing the movements of our faces, mouths, and eyes. But it can only be amazing if it can see the details. Now, enough light is important. Webcams are pretty good today but low light really breaks down the image. So one of the things that you need to watch for is a harsh backlight.

A real harsh backlight can actually end up shadowing a lot of your face, and as you can see as I kind of move into it that the light actually obliterates part of my face. And as you saw we actually lost tracking there just for a second. So you want to try to keep a flare from going directly into your camera from your lights. Strong overhead lights can also be a negative for you. 'Cause as you can see, my eyes, they're rather sunken anyway, and with the overhead light really shadows my eyes so it's going to be harder for the camera to pick up my iris.

And you can see the eyes jumping around a little bit on the character when they shouldn't be. And I'm still surprised at how well it picks it up. But give your camera enough light to be able to pick up your eyes and your irises so that the software can track it. So the best way to light is just to have nice even lighting, in particular if you could have some light directly in front of your face. So what we have set up here is a nice soft LED light just above eye level but not too high coming straight in, so it illuminates underneath the bridge of my eyebrows, you can see my irises very clearly, you can see the dots on my face, it's tracking me very clearly, I have a little bit of a backlight so it just kind of separates my head from the background so it can see the outline very clearly.

LED lights don't heat up, so they don't heat up the room and they last forever. So take just a moment to get better lighting to help Character Animator help you. (jazzy music)