🎉 We are excited to announce the release of a new version featuring animals mode, along with several other updates. Special thanks to the dedicated efforts of the LivePortrait team. 💪 We also provided an one-click installer for Windows users, checkout the details [here](./2024-08-05.md).
We are pleased to announce the release of the animals mode, which is fine-tuned on approximately 230K frames of various animals (mostly cats and dogs). The trained weights have been updated in the `liveportrait_animals` subdirectory, available on [HuggingFace](https://huggingface.co/KwaiVGI/LivePortrait/tree/main/) or [Google Drive](https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1UtKgzKjFAOmZkhNK-OYT0caJ_w2XAnib). You should [download the weights](https://github.com/KwaiVGI/LivePortrait?tab=readme-ov-file#2-download-pretrained-weights) before running. There are two ways to run this mode.
> Please note that we have not trained the stitching and retargeting modules for the animals model due to several technical issues. _This may be addressed in future updates._ Therefore, we recommend **disabling stitching by setting the `--no_flag_stitching`** option when running the model. Additionally, `paste-back` is also not recommended.
Before launching, ensure you have installed `transformers==4.22.0`, `pillow>=10.2.0`, which are already updated in [`requirements_base.txt`](../../../requirements_base.txt). We have chosen [X-Pose](https://github.com/IDEA-Research/X-Pose) as the keypoints detector for animals. This relies on `transformers` and requires building an OP named `MultiScaleDeformableAttention` by
> [X-Pose](https://github.com/IDEA-Research/X-Pose) is only for Non-commercial Scientific Research Purposes, you should remove and replace it with other detectors if you use it for commercial purposes.
- **Driving Options**: We have introduced an `expression-friendly` driving option to **reduce head wobbling**, now set as the default. While it may be less effective with large head poses, you can also select the `pose-friendly` option, which is the same as the previous version. This can be set using `--driving_option` or selected in the Gradio interface. Additionally, we added a `--driving_multiplier` option to adjust driving intensity, with a default value of 1, which can also be set in the Gradio interface.
- **Retargeting Video in Gradio**: We have implemented a video retargeting feature. You can specify a `target lip-open ratio` to adjust the mouth movement in the source video. For instance, setting it to 0 will close the mouth in the source video 🤐.
### Others
- [**Poe supports LivePortrait**](https://poe.com/LivePortrait). Check out the news on [X](https://x.com/poe_platform/status/1816136105781256260).
- [ComfyUI-LivePortraitKJ](https://github.com/kijai/ComfyUI-LivePortraitKJ) (1.1K 🌟) now includes MediaPipe as an alternative to InsightFace, ensuring the license remains under MIT and Apache 2.0.
- [ComfyUI-AdvancedLivePortrait](https://github.com/PowerHouseMan/ComfyUI-AdvancedLivePortrait) features real-time portrait pose/expression editing and animation, and is registered with ComfyUI-Manager.
