Face animation
 

Hello,

I'm quite new for Maya, but have quite a lot of knowledge of modeling in 3Dmax. And i'm curently switching to maya, because i think it's much more powerfull than Max.

But there are a lot of modeling tutorials. About animation and perticular facial animation I can't find one.

I already have a character but I don't know how to set up the face for Facial animation in Maya. If someone could give me some advise, and a tutorial would be great.

I realy like to know how you can make mouth and eyes and so on animated. Could you set up a kind of menu with a slider for the mouth or is it working different? If someone could explaine this to me.

With regards,

A

there are different ways to do it, but one popular method is using blend shape. In this process, you duplicate the head and model it in your keyframe positions. Depending on how pefect you want your lip-synch, you could need quite a few duplicates. Each duplicate would have a different expression or vowel mouth form. Then, you select all your duplicates, hold shift, select your original and in your animation menu set, Deform > Create Blend Shape. Now, go to Window > Animation Editors > Blend Shape. You'll have a slider for each duplicate you created. As you raise the sliders, the original will morph into the selected duplicate expression. From there, it's just a matter of animating the sliders.

Thanks!!
 

Thanks for the replay. I will try this. I always saw different face in tuts or making of's. But never knew it was something like this or just this.

Thanks you for the replay it will give me a starting point.

Regards,

A

re facial animation....
 

Hi there,

This is a link to the AW site that has a tut from the animated movie 'Bingo'.

This tut on 'Blendshape' shows the process of utilizing Maya's power with 'procedural' animation (moving many morph targets with a single user defined slider).

http://www.aliaswavefront.com/en/Tmp...racter_m.html#

Then click on link below 'CHARACTER': 'How to blend facial poses'.

I strongly suggest this as a method for facial animation. This is the kind of stuff that really defines and separates Maya from the competition.

re Jim

question
 

I explored the tutorial of facial blend from the AliasWavefront site and have some questions about it.

I did make a simple object for some facial animation. But I saw that in the blendshapestart.Ma the different faces were in a "group" or node. When i create a empty node I don't know how to attach or get the poses in that particulair node.

What's not in the tutorial is what Blend shape requers. How to set up the charachter to use blend shape.

Could someone explaine some of that?

Thanks!

Arce

alternatives to blendshape, and moveing facial animation from lo to hires model
 

Does anyone have any alternatives to blendshape facial animation?

Maybe splines for muscles (bones) that move the geometry?
Bones that move the facial muscles?
Boxes/Nulls/Locators that move the skin?

Any ideas?

I'm also interested in a facial rig that can move animation from a lores model to the full, hires final model... Anyone?

I'm sure there are lots of ways. Another way that I've seen used is lattices over the groups of CVs for individual movements of the face.

replay
 

Hi again.

I would like to know what kind of technique there are for facial animation.

But for now i'm exploring the facial blend technique. It maybe sound silly, but do you need to first make a group (the head) before using the blend method? And how do you create a group? first make an emty node? and them "attach the facial parts to that node? is that how I create a group?

Please I understand the technique, but do not know how to "set it up" If someone want to explain that, I realy realy appriciate that!!

Regards,

Arce

You don't necessarily HAVE to group them, but it does make it easier. To group something, simply select all the surfaces you want in the group and Ctrl + G.

I'm not a pro at Maya, but can't you make a cluster of CV's? I don't know about lattices as was said before, but the Instant Maya book has some stuff about it in there. You basically select the CV's you want to move, choose Deform>Create Cluster, then fiddle around in the Set Driven Key window to go from the original position to a different position. After it's all said and done, you just can manipulate the clusters easily. If you want more on it, IM me, send me a privatemessage, or buy the book. Some of the other ways to do it might be better, though.

Likewise I'm not a pro but this is what i know about it: Blendshapes are a good way to start - can make very controlled animations etc. After digging around and asking questions I've found a lot of studios use a combination of blend shapes with bones/clusters - Have blendshapes for the basic phenomes, and then use bones/clusters attached to SDK's/expressions for further detail and expression where needed. Gets around haveing a canned look which alot of pure blend shape animation seems to have. If you have the money both A|W and Gnomon have some videos of facial rigging which I'm sure will cover these methods in depth.

The 10 second club is having a HUGE discussion on this at the moment... might be worth a visit if you're interested...

http://10secondclub.org

facial animation and setup....
 

Hi all,

Here is two links (you've probably all seen them before but...)

http://www.vetorzero.com/kaya/


http://artur.bluemoon.ee/cg/?dir=por...c%2Ffacialtest

These are great examples of what can be achieved in Maya (straight out of the box.....I think).

I'm assuming the techniques used in the above examples are done using blendshapes only.

I would be keen to find out exactly what processes were invovled, e.g (blendshapes, clusters, etc..) HOMEWORK ANYONE????????

I created a head for a UNI project last year (2 minutes of animation) that used the technique from the tut on blendshape from the AW site.

The head that I created used 25 blenshapes (major muscles fully flexed).

I then used SDK (set driven key) to procedually drive facial expressions that used various combinations of these 25 blendshapes. eg. smile used about 6 or 8 blenshapes.

I then used the Trax editor to separate/layer the animation using Maya's character and sub character nodes. i.e.

main head character,
a sub character node for eyes,
eye look at,
mouth and tongue.

What this achieved for me was the ability to perform most if not all facial mannerisms quickly and precisely that was indeed fun to animate.

Will post up some pics of the head (and blendshapes) one day soon.

Re Jim