'LivePortrait' Is A FREE and Next-Level AI Deepfake Tool

Here's step-by-step guide to set up LivePortrait on your PC.

In the past couple of days, videos of animated portraits from single still images have been going viral on social media platforms like X, Reddit, and LinkedIn. These lifelike portrait animations were the results of a new and open-source AI tool called LivePortrait.

LivePortrait builds upon the face vid2vid framework, which animates still portraits using motion features from driving video sequences.

Image from LivePortrait Whitepaper

If you want to learn about how it works, check out the whitepaper here.

In this article, I will walk you through the step-by-step process of setting up LivePortrait on your local PC. At the end of this tutorial, you should be able to animate static photos like in the examples below:

The process is pretty simple, there will only be three steps that we need to do:

1. Setup LivePortrait

2. Run the Gradio web application

3. Generate animated portraits

Before diving into the step-by-step guide, make sure that your environment is set up or meets the minimum hardware requirements of LivePortrait.

Pre-requisites:

• A capable GPU (I am using an NVIDIA RTX 3060 Ti with 8GB VRAM)

• Download and install the latest Python 3.x

• Download and install the latest Git

• Windows 11 Pro OS

• 16 GB RAM and at least 10 GB local disk space

Set up LivePortrait

1. Clone the Repository: Open your terminal or command prompt and run the following command to clone the LivePortrait GitHub repository:

git clone https://github.com/xinntao/LivePortrait.git

This will create a new folder named ‘LivePortrait’ on your local disk. Alternatively, you can download the GitHub repository and open a terminal to the ‘LivePortrait’ folder.

Image by Jim Clyde Monge

2. Create a Conda Environment: We’ll use Conda to create a clean environment for LivePortrait. If you don’t have Conda installed on your system, check on this guide to install it.

Once you have Conda, run:

conda create -n LivePortrait python==3.9.18

Image by Jim Clyde Monge

This creates a new environment called ‘LivePortrait’ with Python 3.9.18.

3. Activate the Environment: Switch to your newly created environment by running:

conda activate LivePortrait

There will be no logs generated with this command.

4. Install Dependencies: Install all the packages LivePortrait needs with the following command:

pip install -r requirements.txt --user

Be warned that this step will download large files so be sure you have enough local disk space.

Image by Jim Clyde Monge

Download and extract the LivePortrait weights from here. The final file structure should look like this: