Blendshape question...
 

Hi everyone.

I'm hoping you can help me, I've been looking at blendshapes for a character I'm making.

I've drawn some inspiration from a lip-syncing tutorial I found in an old issue of 3D world mag. The tutorial is by Stefan Marjoram, a creative director at Aardman.

He provided a file (it's non-commercial!) of a character and the five basic mouth shapes (ah, b/m/p, oo, ee and f/v)

When you open the film up and turn on the layer's visibility, you'll see what I mean.

My question is that he's made all the blend shapes and managed to move the teeth as well. Now I know, from a failed experiment, that you can't deform a face then teeth and still expect it to work - it didn't for me...

So how did he do it? Did he make a cluster and assign the membership of a tooth the cluster? Is that even possible? Any ideas?

Many thanks

James

James

The best way is to use set driven key to drive the teeth with the particular facial expressions (blendshapes)

Keeping things down to a minimum and separate like this is usually the best way and less intensive on your PC etc.

Cheers
Jay

Re: Blendshape question...
 

usually the teeth and parts of the face are rigged (with appropriate weightings) to open and close the mouth, and then the blend shapes just allow grinning, sneering and so on. You can build up a set of facial expression that, along with jaw movement allow formation of all of the mouth shapes associated with speech. One thing to note is that you have to adjust the order in which the effects are applied - iirc you apply the blend shape first then the jaw movement, because if you do it the other way round it ignores the jaw movement. there is an excellent digital-tutors tutorial on this.

Erm...I just wouldnt weight the teeth, just no way. Parenting them to the highest joint in the head/neck is far more appropriate and will be lighter to use, this is how I do our set up in our studio. Teeth have no need for weighting as they do not deform like limbs, a simple rotation key with the correct blendshape ie mouth_open is enough.

things like the tongue can be weighted nicely with some nice spline IK though...

Cheers
Jay

I didn't mean weighting the teeth, just bits of the face so that it stretches correctly. sorry, badly phrased on my part :)

Radical Edward

No Probs...

Jay

thanks guys for your input.

I understand how to make the mouth move etc. But I was looking that the tutorial because it offered me another way to make mouth movements.

The author of the tutorial, Aardman's Stefan Marjoram, used this method to recreated the "liveliness" offered by clay (because mouthshapes are replaced in clay.