Live Link Face for effortless facial animation in Unreal Engine — Capture performances for MetaHuman Animator to achieve the highest fidelity results or stream facial animation in real time from your iPhone or iPad for live performances.
Capture facial performances for MetaHuman Animator:
- MetaHuman Animator uses Live Link Face to capture performances on iPhone then applies its own processing to create high-fidelity facial animation for MetaHumans.
- The Live Link Face iOS app captures raw video and depth data, which is ingested directly from your device into Unreal Engine for use with the MetaHuman plugin.
- Facial animation created with MetaHuman Animator can be applied to any MetaHuman character, in just a few clicks.
- This workflow requires an iPhone (12 or above) and a desktop PC running Windows 10/11, as well as the MetaHuman Plugin for Unreal Engine.
Real time animation for live performances:
- Stream out ARKit animation data live to an Unreal Engine instance via Live Link over a network.
- Visualize facial expressions in real time with live rendering in Unreal Engine.
- Drive a 3D preview mesh, optionally overlaid over the video reference on the phone.
- Record the raw ARKit animation data and front-facing video reference footage.
- Tune the capture data to the individual performer and improve facial animation quality with rest pose calibration.
Timecode support for multi-device synchronization:
- Select from the iPhone system clock, an NTP server, or use a Tentacle Sync to connect with a master clock on stage.
- Video reference is frame accurate with embedded timecode for editorial.
Control Live Link Face remotely with OSC or via the MetaHuman Plugin for Unreal Engine:
- Trigger recording externally so actors can focus on their performances.
- Capture slate names and take numbers consistently.
- Extract data for processing and storage.
Browse and manage the captured library of takes:
- Delete takes within Live Link Face, share via AirDrop.
- Transfer directly over network when using MetaHuman Animator.
- Play back the captured video on the phone.
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Live Link Face FAQ
Is Live Link Face free?
Yes, Live Link Face is completely free and it doesn't have any in-app purchases or subscriptions.
Is Live Link Face legit?
⚠️ The Live Link Face app has poor ratings and negative feedback. Users seem unsatisfied with its performance or features.
This app hasn’t been updated in forever and doesn’t even work properly since at least UE5.4 nor 5.5. I have my computer and my iPhone on the same network, firewall inbound and outbound permissions for everything UE related enabled, Local Network enabled for this app, and more, yet it still doesn’t work. Uninstalling ASAP
Can’t get files off my phone
So every time I go to get the files off my phone by uploading to Google Drive I get an error now. It use to work but all of the sudden uploading to Google Drive doesn’t work and I don’t have an apple computer to airdrop the files to
Doesn’t work
Got this when i just downloaded it “ An error occurred initializing the selected capture mode. Session activation failed” i haven’t even moved anything
Broken version
Does not work on iPhone 12 Pro, iOS 17
Latest version broken
Unfortunately this app needs to be updated to request camera permission. The current update becomes completely unusable in iOS 17.
Camera permissions?
I can’t get my camera permissions to activate. The app is useless without it. I go to my settings and live link just isn’t an option to select.
Overall great app
One minor issue: if you record at 30 fps the resulting CSV file will have gaps on the data. By this I mean there are 16 frames with key frame data, followed by 16 more frames with no key frames at all, followed by another 16 with data. This pattern repeats for the entire recording. If you record at 60 fps, this bug does not occur. Just an FYI!
Not Working
Every time I record a take and try to transfer it to unreal, unreal encounters an error trying to open the depth data.bin file. Looking in the folder for the takes there is no such file. Seems pretty broken to me. Would be cool if it worked.
Crashes when you hit record
As soon as I hit the record icon the app just shuts down.
Black screen and crashes
Every time i try to use it, it crashes and nothing shows up in the area my camera feed should be. Please fix epic games, very sad 😭
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