facial phenmones and expressions
 

hello.... i was wondering if i could get some help on an animation short that i'm working on. Basically i have a character and am currently working on his lip sync. After the lip sync i was going to proceed to his facial expressions, that also includes the movement of his eyebrows. The phenmones and facial expressions are all done in blending. Meaning i have a blend for each of the vowels, consonant groups, eyebrow movement, and facial muscles. My plan WAS to animate the lip sync, then the eyebrows, and then the facial muscles/expressions. I already have the lip sync done. The problem that i NOW run into is that, when i start animating his eyebrows OR facial expressions, those blends (eyebrows and facial expressions), distort my lip syncs. Does anyone have any solutions?????



I was thinking about using clusters for the eyebrow movement and facial expressions. But they seem limited. I've tried that before, and when i had a vertices belonging to more then one cluster, i had a double transformation effect. i mean... as soon as i moved the cluster, the vertice would jump off the screen.

Does anyone have particular method of doing lip syncs and facial expressions???? Or am i doing something wrong???

Thanks in advance and sorry for bugging you guys so much.

Post up a picture... Its sounds like some of the points on the brows where tweaked or moved when making the shapes of the mouth for example.

Is the distrotion really bad? Because if you think about a face while talking a lot of points move all over.

hey Kurt,
Thanks for replying so quickly. The distortion in result of the facial are not extreme, but it does make a lot of difference when it comes to the lip sync. Here are two pictures. The top image is an example of a lip sync, but lets say i also wanted to animate his eyebrow to give him a mean look of some sort. Well when i animate his eyebrow, it distorts his lip sync from an "a" to a "o". Did i do something wrong while making the facial blends???

From the looks of it some how there is weight on the points between the brows and the mouth shape.... Did you smooth the character before or after making the blendshapes?


Its hard to explain a bit.. when I do blendshapes i make all the shapes in there lowest form then i only smooth the main head after all the shapes are done... I found if i dont do it that why i do get some moving around in places i dont wont kinda like your mouth.

You can also try combineing the sliders a bit more to get the shap backand key it once you have back to normal

Hi Strytus,
I'm familiar with this situation. The quick workaround involves copying the blendshapes that you need to adjust to use them as the base model for the adjustments that you will make on the active blendshapes. What you do it take the problem blendshapes to their extreme positions. Then, you template the copied "correct" version and adjust the distorted version to meet up with the correct copy and reposition the verticies. Of course, I work in the orthographic views and wireframe. Doing it that way keeps you from having to delete the blendshapes. Good luck my friend! see ya soon.