Disclosed is a method of capturing and processing facial motion data. The method includes: coupling sensors to target points on a face of an actor; capturing frame by frame images of the face using a motion capture camera disposed on a head-mounted system; performing a tracking function on the images to map the sensors for each frame; generating a modelled surface representing the face; projecting a speckle pattern on the face using a near-IR light; and generating a 3-D mesh of the facial surface by triangulating the speckle pattern.
Projecting a near-IR speckle pattern on the face to track the facial features and then creating a 3D mesh