You Can Motion Capture With Only One Camera

Side by side, the actor and the animation the motion capture is applied to. What you need is After Effects, (Checked Craigslist lately?) a video or web cam, something to make marks on your face and an actor willing to be filmed with weird looking dots on his/her face. Notice that the movement is not an exact match but it is very effective. This technique works really good for lip sync. The nice thing about this technique is it exaggerates and dramatizes expressions and acting witch is what animators over the decades have discovered, works really well in the medium of cartooning and animation. That is why the use of "squash" and "stretch" has become prevalent in animating. This blog-site is dedicated to this type of cartoony, motion capture for 2D animation. Let me know what you think or if you have any questions.

Intro to Motion Capture for 2D Face Animation

This is the one. Animating using motion capture is in your grasp. Animate faces, facial features with After Effects. 2D animation. You can do this at home. To date this is one of the most cost effective ways. Act out the expressions you want your characters to express. Lip sync that looks fresh, not program produced. Using this method, your animations will come to life. Try it to see how simple it is. It's easy once you get started.

Animate the entire face all at once. Smile and your character smiles. Let me know if you try this. This approach is for the artists out there.

Make A Head Turn with Motion Capture

This video will show you how to set up a character's head for animating using motion tracking data. Animate a camera instead of the head to greatly simplify turns of the head. When the head seems to turn it makes the animation "pop." A 2D animation can seem more 3D. With some limits you can turn 2D heads and make them look 3D. You can do facial motion capture with one camera. (not the vertual camera in the software but a video camera) To motion capture for face first you animate the expressions with motion track data and then you track head turning movement by using After Effect's 3D capabilities. This video covers mocap for head turning in semi-3D.