Facial Poses

[Ilidrake]

Here I am again fishing...this time for help.

 

Everyone knows I'm working on the Woke Up Dead movie (check my signature)

 

So I'm making progress with the models but now comes the part where I need to do phenomes and such....(think I spelled that right)

 

Beyond the basic phenomes what would the rest of you guys recommend as a base line set of facial expressions that are a must have in the line up. I guess what I'm doing is trying to compile a complete list of what really comes in handy. So go ahead and hit me. Doesn't matter what anyone says this is all good stuff to know.... (all this stuff I'm learning will one day become a video tut for future AMers)...

 

And for clarity sake, these are to be done in mesh mode with sliders. So what should the sliders settings be? 100 or -100 to 100? Like I said just fishing so any info here about facial animating is good

 

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Left Smile/Right Smile - Smile

Left Frown/Right Frown - Frown

Left Mouth Open/Right Mouth Open - Mouth Open

Mouth Closed

[robcat2075]

A good book on the strategy of facial animation is Jason Osipa's "Stop Staring" although I don't think the current version covers A:M and the original version wasn't aware of several relevant features in A:M.

 

He has varying levels of need-to-have

 

Some minimums for the mouth would be open "ah" pose, then the sideways stretched "ee" pose, then the "oo" pose and maybe the slightly curled in "mm/b" pose.

 

Then you might add raising and lowering the corners of the mouth for smile/frown. Note that smiles pull back more than up.

 

You want to be able to raise and lower eyebrows and at various angles.

 

You want to be raise an lower the upper and lower eyelids independently to follow eyes looking up or down. Real eyelids are not rigid shells that rotate up and down, they drape over the pupil and the part where the pupil is is pushed a bit wider.

 

Nostril flares? Cheek puffs? maybe.

 

My own preference is to rig most of the face features with bones. Things like jaws, lips and eyelids tend to move around a center point and bones lend themselves to doing that smoothly whereas poses tend to move in straight line fashion from key to key.

 

I find cheeks maddening to do well, to keep the fleshy look as the lips move around. I resort to smart skin to augment the result of my boned lips and jaw.

[higginsdj]

Personally I do not like pre-configured poises as they are notoriously difficult to add on top of (ie to create variations - a wry smile whilst speaking etc) You will also run into issues with fast speech and have to pick a mouth shap that is inbetween 2 ore more shapes of just skip them altogether....

 

I like the FACE setup we had on TWO and SO. If necessary you can create Phenomic poses using those controls but it does become very quick and simple to create the mouth shapes you need on the fly...

 

Cheers