First of all, make sure tracking is toggled on.


Now switch to the Advanced UI.

Lock into your neutral position and expression and click here and here to Quickly Calibrate your Pose (for your body position) and Expression (for your facial expression).

Keeping a neutral position and expression while calibrating is extremely important.

Keep in mind that neutral position means the position you will be in most of the times while recording or streaming, and neutral expression means no facial expression whatsoever.

This can also be done from the simple UI, using the Auto Calibrate tracking button, which does both things.


**As you can see, a neutral expression and body pose are what you use when you’re really not doing or thinking anything in particular. If you make a special type of face or positioning your body in an odd way during the calibration instead of the neutral one, the baseline for tracking will be improperly calibrated and your avatar might end up looking weird, causing it to look sleepy or just not behave properly.**

First, we’ll be looking into the head pose calibrations, and only after will we dive into facial expressions.


The sensitivity setting in the Body and Head Pose tab will basically set the intensity of the avatar’s reaction to your movement. If you want to move your head/body only a tiny bit for the avatar to do a full rotation/swing, set this value higher. If you want the avatar to seem “less hyperactive” and your movements to trigger less of reaction, set this value lower.

The smoothing slider will adjust how smooth the animation’s transition will be, how fast it will happen.The highest value slows down the movement, making it very smooth, while the lowest value makes the move lightning fast but makes any noise registered by the tracker more visible.


Now, let’s get down to business.



These settings may seem simple but it’s best that you go through all of them to perfectly tune the body. Any sloppiness in these moments might ruin the credibility of your video.

Now, switch to the Expression Units tab.

Before we dig into the next menu I would like to point out that FaceRig has two types of avatars, each with it’s own set of settings.

I’m talking about avatars with Animation Atomics and Free Form Retargeting. You can learn more about the differences between the two by clicking here to watch a short video.

Keep in mind that all the panels have basically the same buttons and sliders so they do about the same things, but for different parts of the face (excepting eyebrows and nose, which are a tiny bit different. We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it)

Now that that’s done, switch to the Expression Units tab.



The Disable/Enable buttons basically shut down or turn on a particular set of settings. You just have to try them all out to get the most accuracy and expressiveness out of your avatar. Sometimes you may want to disable something like Pursed Lips in order to avoid a certain animation completely. That depends on the style of your video, of course, but keep it in mind.

Under the General panel we have the Nose Up/Down feature. This tracks your noses movement on your face in relation to your upper lip.

You may have noticed that there are two greenzone intervals (one for the lower limit and one for the upper limit) and a grey zone. The grey zone, also called a neutral or dead zone, is the tracking interval in which the nose movement will trigger no animation. This is designed this way so that the tracker doesn’t interpret the natural shifting of your nose position (while talkin, for example) as something that needs to trigger animations (such as the nose up animation that some make when they frown, purse their lips and raise their nose).

The first 3 subtabs of the Expression Units panel are used to calibrate the Animations Atomics avatars and the Retargeting panel is used to calibrate the Retargeted avatars.

Looking at the Eyes tab you will notice quite a few a lot of settings. Don’t be alarmed, these can be configured very easily.

I recommend you switching the Link with counterpart option on all the sections so you don’t have to set the same positions for the interval sliders twice.

Beware that linking the left and right side will result in calibration issues when you don’t have even lighting on both sides of your face. If the position of the tracking bar (black bar) is not identical on both sides for whatever reason but the positions of the min/max sliders are linked and, as a result, are identical from one side of the face to the other, this will result in asymmetrical behavior in animations being triggered. So keep in mind that while we generally recommend proper lighting to makes the left and right side look symmetrical, individual calibration of these settings can solve a lot of problems.


Left Eye Closed calibrates how much the avatar’s eyes will open/close. But, before you do that, please make sure that you don’t have Auto Blink enabled in the Behavior tab under the Avatars menu.

Left Eye Left/Right tunes how much the avatar’s eyes will go to the left/right. Yet again, please make sure that you don’t have the avatar’s Look at Camera Ratio turned up to max in the same Behavior panel I mentioned earlier.
Left Eye Squint tweaks how severe or subtle squint your avatar’s will pull of when you, you guessed it, squint your eyes.

Left Eye Up/Down calibrates how much the avatar’s eyes will go up/down.
Left Eyebrow Exterior tunes the exterior corner of your eyebrow and how much it goes down or up.
Left Eyebrow Interior does the exact same thing as the option above, but for the inner corner.
You may have noticed that the Eyebrow settings have 2 two greenzone intervals (one for the lower limit and one for the upper limit) and a grey zone. The grey zone, also called a neutral or dead zone, is the tracking interval in which the eyebrow movement will trigger no animation. This is designed this way so that the tracker doesn’t interpret the natural shifting of your eyebrow position (while talkin, for example) as something that needs to trigger animations.

If your avatar is frowning or looks surprised when you don’t intend it to, increase the neutral zone and move the greenzones for the corresponding animation further towards the edges.

Now to the Mouth panel:

Jaw drop calibrates how much does the avatar’s mouth open.
Lip Stretch Left/Right tweaks the corners of your lips and how far out they go.
Pursed Lips calibrates how good of a duck-face your avatar does.
Pursed Lips Left/Right fiddles with the corners of the avatar’s mouth while you’re doing the duck-face.
And, finally, Upper Lip Raiser works out exactly how high can your upper lip go.

Here you can fine tune expressions and behavior for the Retargeted avatars.

The Smoothing option smoothes out the transition between opposite expressions (for example from Lips Unsure to a giant smile). The highest value slows down the movement, making it very smooth, while the lowest value makes the move lightning fast but also a bit jitterish.


The Noise threshold is basically value that affects when animations trigger on the avatar in relation to the movement detected by the tracker on your webcam feed.

The Noise Threshold multiplier is a value that will render the avatar more responsive or more stiff, increasing or decreasing its resilience to changes in the position of the tracking landmarks.

If it’s set lower, it will take more of a change in facial expression to trigger an animation in the avatar. If it’s set higher, the avatar will basically become more sensitive to movement as a deviation of a tracking landmark point will be registered as a valid signal for animation to trigger.


The Jaw Noise Threshold Multiplier multiplies your former settings turning them even higher or lower. This particular slider affects only the dropping jaw gesture.

The Mouth Noise Threshold Multiplier multiplies your former settings too, making the mouth gestures even more exaggerated or subtle.

The Eyebrows Noise Threshold Multiplier does exactly the same thing but affects only the gestures regarding eyebrow movement.

The Global noise threshold multiplier is a global multiplier (just as the name suggest) that affects all the noise thresholds.