T-Dogg Posted September 25, 2006 Share Posted September 25, 2006 I have created a character whose face is simply a decal. I would like to learn how to animate a face using decals. If any of you have seen the short film Batman: New Times on the internet, then you will understand the look I am going for. I am just learning about rigging and relationships so I am probably going about this thing completely wrong, but this is what I have tried so far. (I got the idea from the teapot example in Chapter 8 of David Rogers' Animation:Master - A Complete Guide.) Based on the original decal, I created 4 more decals of expressions for happy, sad, surprised, and angry. I numbered these images along with the original base image and imported them into my project as an image sequence. Next, I created a bone and named it "facial expression". In this bone's properties window, I right clicked on transform and chose "new relationship". I centered the bone and gave it no rotation and set the image to frame 0 (the base image). Then I rotated the bone -90 on the Y-axis and set the image to frame 1 (happy), and so on. My intention was to be able to rotate the facial expression bone left or right or up or down to change the expression. For some reason, I haven't been able to get it to work as intended. Even if my plan would have worked, this would have still been a very simplistic setup only alowing for 5 different facial expressions. What I would like to do is set up various poses using decals and be able to animate the face and lipsynch in the same ways people do with faces that are actually modelled. Unfortunately, I do not know how. I'm not even sure if it is possible. Can someone please help? I would really appreciate it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
itsjustme Posted September 25, 2006 Share Posted September 25, 2006 If you're going to use a bone rotation, a Smartskin is what you're looking for to change the facial expressions. Make on/off poses for each expression, then make a Smartskin for the bone you want to use to control the expressions that turns them on and off depending on the rotation. I'll attach a simple example. Hope that helps. decal_changing_Smartskin_example.zip Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
T-Dogg Posted September 25, 2006 Author Share Posted September 25, 2006 Thank you so much, David. I'll check that out. I almost had it working again the way I was previously doing it, but a strange problem occured. I set up the relationship like so: [attachmentid=20880][attachmentid=20881] [attachmentid=20882][attachmentid=20886] But then when I tried it in an action window, I got this: [attachmentid=20883][attachmentid=20884][attachmentid=20885] It's as if I lost the first frame from the image when I went into the action. I thought I really had it this time! I'll try it your way. I'm sure it will work much better. Will it also work if I decide to try my hand at creating separate decals for the mouth for phonemes, and the eyes for blinking, and so on? How far can a person really go with this? Please excuse my ignorance. A:M as a whole is still a learning process for me. To be completely honest, I've never done any smartskinning before. I thought it was only used to fix messed up joints. PS - WOW! I just tried your file. That would work well for either the mouth or the eyes open and closed. I am going to have to dig in and see how you set this up. Maybe I can even add some intermediate images and get a smoother transition. Thanks you so much! You've really inspired me to delve deeper into this! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pengy Posted September 26, 2006 Share Posted September 26, 2006 why not just use a percentage pose to control it?or one for eyes mouth etc? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
T-Dogg Posted September 27, 2006 Author Share Posted September 27, 2006 why not just use a percentage pose to control it?or one for eyes mouth etc? I am still trying to figure this stuff out. I still don't know how to do most of the things you guys talk about. Basically, the idea just came to me and I started experimenting some trying to figure it out. I made this character and gave him a simple decal for a face because I am still no good at modelling faces. People told me it looked good like that and I shouldn't change it, so now I have to figure out how to use him as such. I haven't really seen any documentation on this other than what I mentioned previously from David Rogers' book. I hate asking so many stupid questions and sounding like an idiot here on the forums, but sometimes I don't think I have any other options. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
3DArtZ Posted September 27, 2006 Share Posted September 27, 2006 Bravo on taking the steps to experiment and learn!!!! I think maybe on/off poses would do it better than the bones. Mike Fitz www.3dartz.com Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LurkerAbove Posted September 27, 2006 Share Posted September 27, 2006 You know, I had a similar issue with Gala, where I wanted her eyebrows to move, but her eyebrows are decals. If I understand right, after you apply the decal, the decal deforms after its applied and you move the CPs. Someone did a percentage pose slider (just do a search on gala and eyebrows and you'll find the example) for her eyebrows and it worked very nicely. I haven't experiemented much with other options, but if you were to create the right CPs behind the decal, you could even rig a decaled face and it should work pretty nifty. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
T-Dogg Posted September 28, 2006 Author Share Posted September 28, 2006 Bravo on taking the steps to experiment and learn!!!! I think maybe on/off poses would do it better than the bones. Mike Fitz www.3dartz.com Thanks Mike! I was trying to set up poses yesterday, but the same thing that happened with the bone project happened again. A:M seems to lose track of the first frame of my imported sequence. I think I am going to try it again, but this time I will apply each expression decal individually insted of as an image sequence. If I set it up to make 1 decal visible while turning the others tranparent, I think it will work. Wish me luck! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
3DArtZ Posted September 28, 2006 Share Posted September 28, 2006 Bravo on taking the steps to experiment and learn!!!! I think maybe on/off poses would do it better than the bones. Mike Fitz www.3dartz.com Thanks Mike! I was trying to set up poses yesterday, but the same thing that happened with the bone project happened again. A:M seems to lose track of the first frame of my imported sequence. I think I am going to try it again, but this time I will apply each expression decal individually insted of as an image sequence. If I set it up to make 1 decal visible while turning the others tranparent, I think it will work. Wish me luck! Ohhhh, I missed that part that you were using an image sequence file.... had I seen that I would have suggested just importing the indiviual face expressions as ind. files. Will keep it a bit easier to track in ones mind. Keep us posted. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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