Ryan Maloney animates Peter Griffin in Adobe Character Animator using a $20 webcam. His head movements drive the character's head, and facial tracking controls the eyes and mouth. A webcam can animate an entire cartoon face, saving time in production.
In the last video, we set up Peter Griffin's head in Adobe Character Animator to automatically sync with my camera. You can see my face is being mapped by Adobe Character Animator. I'm just using this $20 webcam from Amazon, and you can see my face is tracked with these red dots. When I move my head, Peter's head moves. You're going to want to go into the character and move around the pins so the character doesn't bend around too much. Once you have it set into place, you can start to talk.
Peter's pupils match my pupils, eyebrows match, and the mouth matches.
And I suppose at this point I have to try to do a Peter Griffin impression. This is going to be painfully bad.
Uh, uh, uh, P, uh, uh, Tier, uh, um, Griffin. Oh!
All right, so I have a little work to do on the mouth. The expressions aren't absolutely perfect, but if I spent more time on this and refined it, you'd get the idea that you can pretty much animate an entire cartoon face using your webcam or camera and save a ton of time in your animation production.
