After studying my current possibilities with motion capture I have done the same research for facial capture.
It is important since it is not the same to have a character that moves the body but has a static face than to have a character that has a facial expression while moving.
For example, below I put Mark's idle animation. You will see on the left the character without facial expression and on the right the same but with a facial capture.
The difference is subtle but makes the character look more alive. (By the way, the beard and eyebrows can only be seen at the shortest distance because they are pending for development in other LODs.)
In order to put this animation on the face I need a facial capture system and there are several systems, like we have seen for mocap such the Rokoko suit, the AI in the cloud, Kinect, etc.
In this case I have explored fewer options and I have gone directly to Unreal's Live Link Face app. The operation is similar to that of Pose AI that I mentioned in the last post, where you use an iPhone to capture movement in real time and a plugin to record it in Unreal.
Unlike Pose AI, Live Link Face takes advantage of Apple's facial recognition technology to detect the features of the face and the movements we make and an animation is achieved with an amazing result.
Perhaps the facial animation obtained is not perfect but for now it is more than enough for my project.
If you wanted to go further, right now the option you would have to acquire should be a more specialized capture system such as Faceware or the Rokoko face module.
The next step will be to program the basic movement of the character.