Facial Animation
 

Hi,

I just made this polygon head and now I want to go ahead and give facial animation a shot.

What is the easiest way to go about this? Deformers? If so, which ones? Or if not deformers, do I just move bunches of CVs around?

I guess I know I have to use Blenshape deformers to do the ACTUAL animation, but I want to know how to go about getting the different expressions that I will use for the blenshapes

Incase someone wanted to comment/critique it, I've attached my head too.

thanks,

Just duplicate the face a few times for how many different faces you want, and shape them. Than create you blendshapes..

For blendshapes, you'd duplicate the head and modify it to form a target expression. You'd go about this several times to create all your different expressions and vowel targets for lip synching.

Then, select all your duplicates, shift select your original and under the Animation Menues, Deform > Create Blend Shape. Now, if you open the BlendShape control box (Window > Animation Editors > Blend Shape) you can manipulate all the different sliders to get the expressions you want and key them.

Like so:

Blend shapes is probably the easiest method for facial animation.

Another approach is to contruct a facial animation rig using joints, clusters, etc. It's a lot more complex in many ways, but you do get a great deal of control over the entire face (or whatever you build into the rig). Also, you are not constrained to blendshapes you build, nor do you have to build every possible combination of facial movements.

Another great reason for a facial rig is flexibility and reusability. Blendshapes are specific to individual meshes. Every time you have a new character, you have to redo the blendshapes. Rigs and can be adjusted and reused on other characters. You could feasibly animate the rig once, and then skin it to a variety of characters. That part takes a lot of planning, but it can be done.

Have you done this rigging?

Is there a website/turorial/book that gives guidelines on how to do this?
Its kinda what I was trying, using lattices/clusters, so... could you help me out a bit?

thanks,

Here are two great threads on the subject over at CG-Talk:

http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=20832
http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=34237

I have yet to complete a facial rig of my own (too busy doing other stuff), but when I do, I'll be sure to share what I learn up here.

The website you directed me to is pretty neat.

Thanks,

re facial animation
 

Hi there,

In answer to your question re best techniques for facial animation. I'm sure there are many methods. the method I used comes from a tut on AW site called 'blendshape' or something similar.

http://forum.simplymaya.com/showthre...&threadid=1537


SCROLL DOWN TO BOTTOM OF PAGE (KEVIN'S POST) "DOWNLOAD HERE".
About 1.6 meg download.

Anyway, here is a link (Simply Maya) to a head that I created in 2001 for Uni. I think it has something like 25 blendshapes driven by dynamic attributes that procedurally drive each facial muscle for a multitude of expressions. Open the trax editor and click on the character for head>mouth>eyes, etcc. from there use the dynamic attributes in the channel box and MM button to interactively change the value.

Hope this helps.

re jim