Facial rig test: Using Victor's ideas...

[shaunf]

I've been following Victor Navone's development of his facial rig closely, and using a similar system have been able to rig my latest character much more efficietly than in the past. I've completed a small test (no laughing ..... after Victors effort I'm almost embarressed to post it...) with some detail on the bone structure on my webpage.

 

 

Click here to go to my webpage, then click on the 'The Cuckoo, Animation' link.

 

I'd be interested in peoples thoughts..

 

Cheers

[J. Baker]

Looked pretty good here.

[robcat2075]

It looks quite successful.

 

I'd be interested in hearing more about this mouth rig vs. your previous method and in what ways the old system wasn't getting you what you needed. By chance is there a test of the old way we could see?

[KenH]

Damn. He's so good, he's even doing impressions! Nice..

[zacktaich]

Looks really good, my only suggestion would be exagerating the poses even more.

[jfirestine]

Wow, that is cool!

I think that Victor's rig technic has some merrits. I am very interested to see more. I like the animation, the movements look very good!

 

Keep posting more!

[Zaryin]

I think is looks great.

[shaunf]

I'd be interested in hearing more about this mouth rig vs. your previous method and in what ways the old system wasn't getting you what you needed. By chance is there a test of the old way we could see

 

Previously I just used basic muscle motion poses. I did this by having poses for each spline, and then used these poses to create other poses which made up the mouth shapes. The downside to this is that you need to create poses for every conceivable mouth shape, and due to the additive nature of the poses, they may not necessarily work well together. Using bones and cp falloff, I can assign bones to single splines using the bones falloff (only available with v11.0, you can't assign bone falloff so specifically in the earlier versions of A:M) and it allows you to just assign bones using cp falloff. They then work in all directions.... up, down, left right. So that takes away a huge number of steps. It also ensures that they all work well together, so that when I use a number of poses at the same time, I can still get a uniform mouth shape.

 

Thanks for the comments so far!

[omoanime]

Shaun,

 

Looks excellent. I am both very impressed and very jealous. Once again, you inspire and educate. Thank you for sharing.

 

I watched it half a dozen times or so to see if there was anything that stood out and the only thing I caught was that her bill bounces or quivers open and close ever so slightly after she is finished saying "Vietnam." But that is being extremely nit-picky.

 

Great work! I am definitely going to spend time studying this and Victor's stuff more.

 

Paul

[shaunf]

I watched it half a dozen times or so to see if there was anything that stood out and the only thing I caught was that her bill bounces or quivers open and close ever so slightly after she is finished saying "Vietnam."

 

Thanks Paul! With regards to the above, I stuck that little quiver in as I saw myself doing it when I was trying the clip out in the mirror and I thought it looked more realistic when I had it in.

 

Although I used Victors ideas, due to the different shape of the head and mouth I had to adapt the idea a fair bit ffor it to work.

 

If people are interested I'll post the same clip with the bones in view so you can see what they are doing?

[Parlo]

This is great.. I know that I'd like to see those bones in action!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

... please.

[modernhorse]

As a newbie rigger i must tell you that when i looked at all the bones in cuckoos mouth i nearly puked. But the result is so good I may just have to clean myself up and try it myself ... someday ... far in the future I reckon.

 

Great job Shaun.

 

Doug

[shaunf]

RIghto, here's the same animation rendered in shaded and wireframe mode. Its a little small, but you can make out the individual bones I think. Tell me if its not clear and I'll render out a larger one.

http://www.shaunfreeman.com/animation.htm

 

As a newbie rigger i must tell you that when i looked at all the bones in cuckoos mouth i nearly puked.

 

Modernhorse, its really not that bad. It looks messy but only because there is one bone assigned to each spline in the mouth. Hence, lots of bones. Actually constraining it to move with the jaw, and also creating poses getting the correct movement for different lip shapes was not that much of a problem...