RobotDreamsArt

Refined Facial Expressions

Added 2025-03-20 19:10:08 +0000 UTC

This is a bit more of a technical behind the scenes, so I understand if not everyone finds this sort of thing interesting, but I wanted to share the progress on how I've been making consistent facial expressions.

One difficult thing to deal with when animating between keyframes that are both AI generated, is that sometimes the subject looks similar, but is just different enough to confuse the AI. By taking a face I want to use, I can animate it alone to hit a bunch of different expressions, pull frames from the resulting animation, and then composite them back into the actual keyframes that need to get animated. The end result is that the AI views the main subject of the frames as the same person, even if their other proportions change.

This does present an issue of compositing though. You have to make sure you really match the lighting when you put the new face into the old keyframes. It's easier than having to motion track the face onto a moving person though, like you would have to do in traditional VFX, but it does still complicate things. There will be a few scenes in the final animation that don't use this technique since the footage was generated before I figured out this workflow, but the major growth scenes use this, so their should be anything to pull you all out of the experience!