Custom Head Mounted Camera Rig for Facial Performance Capture

Here is my Home Made, extremely affordable Head Mounted Camera Rig Solution for Facial Performance Capture 🙂 ~ This solution came as result of lacking the funds to purchase a professional Head Mounted Rig. Necessity is indeed the mother of Inventions.

This rig was created from the parts you see in this Image. Anyone can afford these I think 🙂 Most of them can be substituted with parts easily found at Home Deport or Lowes.

I am blessed to have Faceware Technologies (http://www.facewaretech.com) and ImageMetrics supporting me on the Galiwango Film with their Facial Motion Capture Software Solution ~ Analyzer and Retargeter.   One thing I didn’t have though was a head mounted camera rig, which Faceware offers for rent or purchase (http://www.facewaretech.com/faceware-products/head-mounted-cameras ).

So I decided to see if I could make my own from parts I could find by simply looking around the house. What you see here is a result of about 3 hours work of sketching, building and testing the Rig.

The foundation of the rig is a Bike Helmet which I borrowed from my wife. (Yap, Pink!!)  and the rod which supports the camera is taken from my Guitar stand.  The bracing is derived from my daughters hair twisties as she calls them, and they work pretty well in keeping the camera stable on the 2 prong mount.  The 2 springs were in one of my tool bags, and I remember purchasing them from home depot.

I used my Smart Phone for the Camera. The phone is relatively light and has a fairly good built in camera. I was assured by the Faceware team that their software and pipeline can handle most videos of performance captures so I wasn’t worried too much about the quality.

What I had to consider though was the fact that the Video had to be fairly stable for decent analyzing by  Faceware. I had planned on using my DSLR but after attending a Webinar on Head mounted camera rigs, I left convinced that head mounted cameras definitely offered an advantage over a standard capture because of the freedom they accord to an actor without changing the perspective. The camera is set and is always facing the actor regardless of the direction their head moves.