My first spline Head - WIP

[strohbehn]

Hello folks,

 

I'm a new A:M user, just getting used to how A:M works so there is MUCH I don't have a handle on yet, but I thought I'd unveil my first WIP.

 

About half the facial poses are finished. Texturing will come later.

 

So far I'm very impressed with A:M, and am looking forward to joining you all here.

 

Best regards,

 

 

Mark Strohbehn

 

 

 

9/30/04 10 second Lipsync test on page 3

Edited September 30, 2004 by strohbehn

[JTalbotski]

Very nice! Especially for a first head in A:M. Have you done 3D work in other apps?

 

Welcome to the community,

 

Jim

[KenH]

Wow! Excellent start!

[-TC-]

Wow, very nice work strohbehn.

I suppose your going to be doing a lip-sync animation ?

[Pengy]

I second the welcome and look forward to seeing your progress. Could we see a full front view of your mesh?

[starwarsguy]

grt model! I wish I could get that much detail in my heads but it never comes out like i want it. congrats!

[ypoissant]

Wow! For a first head in A:M, it is impressive. This, obviously, is not your first 3D head though. How long is your experience in 3D and animation?

 

And welcome aboard.

[Guest Rogelio Guzman]

Very nice! Especially for your first A:M head.

Keep us updated on the completion of your model.

 

Welcome to the family!

 

 

Rogelio

[strohbehn]

Thanks for the encouraging words.

 

My previous 3D experience consists of a couple of years with Blender. It's been a real challenge relearning everything in A:M language, but my progress has accelerated lately and now it's really enjoyable. The PWS concept was hard to wrap my brain around and there are still a lot of things I don't get, but these boards have been a huge help.

 

It's funny, I originally became interested in 3D when I saw Victor Navone's "Alien Song", but had no idea he used A:M for that until I started looking at alternatives to Blender. The quality of the other A:M Films were enough to entice me to make the move.

 

Next on the "to do" list is teeth, tongue, and texturing. I really only intended to do this head to learn spline modeling and lip sync skills, so photorealism is not what I'm after (yet). Many challenges ahead....

 

 

Mark Strohbehn

[John Keates]

Wow! that is one of the best heads I have seen done in AM! Welcome aboard!

 

Did you rig him or are those poses modeled by hand?

 

One thing that I might suggest is the porcelain material (If you do a search then you should find all about it). Maybe you know about it already. It will basically just smooth out the mesh a little if you want that.

 

Great going though -can't wait to see more.

[strohbehn]

Thanks for the comments. This is my third head, first one with splines. I've never gotten to the actual lipsync or animation part, so this should be fun! I like the tools A:M has for animation.

 

There are three bones so far: neck, head and lower jaw. The CP's of the mouth area are weighted. I'll be adding rigging for the eyes and probably tongue. Other than that, all movements are poses.

 

I tried the porcelain material and get a few black areas, even though all normals point in the same direction. It's probably the result of 5-point patches from what I've been able to gather from other posts. Once it's got bump maps and texture the small ridges shouldn't be visible anymore.

 

I have a few questions:

 

1. There's light shine-through into the mouth/head. Am I missing a setting that prevents this, or do I need to add a "negative" light inside the head?

 

2. When rendering, if I right-click and do a selective area render it works fine. If I hit the "render to file" and try to save a targa file it renders a totally black frame. This must be simple, but I'm stumped.

 

3. There are eye decals for the irises that seem to come and go at will. I end up having to redirect A:M to the file again. The decal image is in a different directory from the prj and mdl files. Would it help to keep them all in the same directory?

 

4. I remember reading a post about aligning all the cp's in a spline to exactly the x=0 value, and now can't find it again. Does anyone happen to have that post bookmarked?

 

Thanks a lot for the help,

 

Mark Strohbehn

[KenH]

The black areas with porcelain are most probably flipped patches. Sometimes it's hard to see. I like to set the option to render only one side of patches. Also there is a way to unify the direction of patches in the "right click" menu. Finally, sometimes you have to save the project and re-open to see the black patches are gone.

To your questions:

 

1. Not sure. Maybe the render to file option would fix this.

 

2. Are you sure you're rendering the right frame range? And there is a light right?

 

3. Could be Opengl/Directx related. Update any drivers and/or switch between the two.

 

4. Can't find the thread, but basically you turn on the "floating menu" then select a piece of the spline and press /(or is it ,) then in the floating menu you input 0 to the x fields. This is from memory, so it's probably flawed...

[nerrazzi]

Excellent work!

 

Looks like you've mastered the hooks & 5 point patches and you've managed to create an ear... a lot of folks still have challenges with creating ears, nicely done though.

 

One crit... I can tell that you're from a poly app. because of the way you connected a spline in the attachment. I'm pretty sure that'll produce unwanted artifacts when you go to animate any head movement. You may want to create a 5pp and head it off with a hook so that there are no potential problems later.

 

But great work, can't wait to see your future projects.

[Aminator]

Great job on the modeling!

 

> 1. There's light shine-through into the mouth/head.

 

Check that your light is set to cast shadows. If you're using Zbuffer shadows, it may still illuminate the inside; ray-traced shadows should be accurate. Experiment with simple internal geometry to work around Zbuffer shadow limitations (they render faster and often look nicer).

 

> 2. If I hit the "render to file" and try to save a targa file it renders a totally black frame.

 

Any chance you have "shadows only" set in render buffer options?

[strohbehn]

Thanks a lot for all of your comments and help. I hope to have time to try out the suggestions this weekend.

[ypoissant]

1. There's light shine-through into the mouth/head. Am I missing a setting that prevents this, or do I need to add a "negative" light inside the head?

Either your light does not cast shadows or the model does not receive shadows. Check those properties for your light and your model and on their shortcuts as well.

 

3.  There are eye decals for the irises that seem to come and go at will.  I end up having to redirect A:M to the file again.  The decal image is in a different directory from the prj and mdl files.  Would it help to keep them all in the same directory?

This is not related to where the decals are located.

 

4.  I remember reading a post about aligning all the cp's in a spline to exactly the x=0 value, and now can't find it again.  Does anyone happen to have that post bookmarked?

 

Select the CPs you want to align on X=0,

Set the group's pivot X position to 0,

Set the group's X scale to 0.

[williamgaylord]

Outstanding artwork. Are you doing the expressions by "hand" with the modeling tools? If so, wait 'til you learn how to rig the face for animation! Then you'll really begin to see where AM excels. Outstanding work so far. The ears are some of the best formed I've ever seen. (I notice ear details because I build my own dummy head binaural microphones--the ears are a very critical part.)

 

Bill Gaylord

[Rodney]

Joining in a few days late here.

 

Doesn't look like I can add much more than a vote of confidence in you growing abilitiies in A:M.

 

As has been pointed out, there are things you can get away with for still renders that you can't for animations. If you can get ahold of someones model that has been set up well for animtion, pick that apart, and study you'll solve any problem you are looking at in your current mesh.

 

I understand you are using this one mainly for the learning of it.

That is what makes it such an awesome attempt. Much much better than where I'm at on humanoid types.

 

Very nice work! Keep at it and you'll find the right ecomomy of splines.

 

Best,

Rodney

[strohbehn]

Hey guys, please hop in here with a little "hand-holding, step-by-step" help if you'd be so kind. This should be easy, and I've searched and read the manual but it's still escaping me.

 

I've made some bump maps (ie for the forehead wrinkles) and want to add relationships to the poses that regulate the percentage of bump relief. Easy enough, right? I know how to add the relationship to a pose, but actually getting the bump percentage of my decal to change as the pose slider changes is not working. I'm doing something wrong, and several hours of experimenting haven't improved my understanding.

 

Any rescuers available to make the light bulb go on over my head?

 

Thanks

[mtpeak2]

Are you changing the bump percentage under the relationship in the action folder or under the model file?

 

When editing your pose, under the actions folder you'll see your relationship, click the plus next to it and you'll see your model, click the red X to show more than driver. Find your decal and you can adjust the percentage there. Just set your percentage at both ends of the slider.

[nerrazzi]

Yip, easy enough...

 

After your decal is applied to your model...

 

1. Create a New Pose

2. Locate your actions folder, then the "Shortcut to your model" folder, this is under your actions folder...

3. To the right of the "Shortcut to model" there should be a little white "thing" with a red "X" on it... click that red X.

4. The Groups, Relationships, Drivers and all that jazz will appear, you want the "Decals" folder.

5. Click the little plus (+) sign to the right of the decals folder and expand it until you get to the "Images" folder.

6. Click the small triangle next to the picture icon of your decal. You're going to need your Pose Slider window open now. (View> Pose Sliders)

7. With the pose slider set to the 100% postion, set the percentage value of your bump map to 100%, now move the slider down to 0% and set the percentage value to 0%.

Move the slider back & forth and see if the percentage value is changing with it.

 

Should work fine now... render different values to check your work.

[nerrazzi]

You know I just thought, using a pose slider to control a bump map say for a vein in someone's forehead during an arm wrestling match... I can see that big ole vein pop right out of the center of this head.

[KenH]

You may be doing it right. Sometimes AM has a problem with refreshing the changes and showing it in the view. So, when you expect a change press spacebar or else try saving the project and re-opening it. Hopefully it should be sorted soon.

[strohbehn]

Bravo people. The light is now ON! Your answers made it clear.

 

For future newbies reading this thread, follow the previous three posts and you'll be fine.

 

It appears A:M wasn't initially refreshing the new bump % values, so even though I may have stumbled on the right solution once or twice I didn't know I had it right. Pressing the spacebar did the trick to refresh the values once I had followed the right steps.

 

I actually like the way things are organized in the PWS, but it's confusing at first to know where to look for what values need changing.

 

My light shine-through problem was due to my not setting "cast shadows" on my lights. The first raytraced result was really odd, but I can read up on that now. Thanks...

 

There's soooo much more to learn. Thanks for helping me along.

 

Mark

[KenH]

One crit... I can tell that you're from a poly app. because of the way you connected a spline in the attachment. I'm pretty sure that'll produce unwanted artifacts when you go to animate any head movement. You may want to create a 5pp and head it off with a hook so that there are no potential problems later.

To understand this, I advise doing the giraffe exercise in the manual. But perhaps this problem could be highlighted abit more in it. It's quite easy to miss.

[strohbehn]

Got a chance to try most of your helpful hints, and you were all correct in your answers.

 

I tried the porcelain material again and did indeed have some normals flipped the wrong way, which was causing the problems (thought I'd gotten them all, but hadn't). Smoothing will help.

 

While looking into nerrazzi'a suggestion about mesh layout on the neck I discovered that that was an old version of the model. Weeks ago I cleaned up the mesh around the ears and neck area on one side, then intended to delete half and copy/flip/paste. Somewhere in the multiple saved versions I grabbed an older version of the mesh and did the poses on that one. Grrrr... now considering redoing the head with rigging just for fun.

 

Pengy asked for a full front view, but I think this one shows everything more clearly. The arrows show changes from the previous mesh.

 

 

Mark

[KenH]

Another thing that is probably a matter of preference....You possibly have too many spline rings round the eyes and the mouth. I would think you could get the same face even after deleting one ring around both. This would also make it easier to animate him...

[strohbehn]

FYI... there is an awsome perl script by Aminator (Jack Morrison) called "splitp.p" that will take a pose and split it into individual Left and Right side poses (and still maintain the bilateral version). I've been experimenting with this for the past few days and it works beautifully! It's a Huge time saver! Contact him to see if he'll post it with the instructions if you're interested. It would make a good tutorial on the Tutorial Resources site.

 

Ken... I actually ended up adding those two rings you mentioned after trying a few poses because I wasn't able to get the fullness below the eye and above the corners of the mouth without them during certain movements. Thanks

 

Mark

[John Keates]

I would certainly keep the spline rings around the eyes and particularly the mouth (for such a realistic face). When rigging, you could try controlling each of the splines radiating from the mouth with a bone with the influence of each bone tailing off as you go away from the mouth (see V Navones wip thread for more on this).

 

It is possible to split poses by copy/pasting cp info from one pose to another but a bit of time saving is always worth it. When mirror mode wasn't working in poses I used to make a pose for the right side of the mouth and then copy/paste-mirrored to another pose. Then I would make another pose that would controll each of the other poses. There are some advantages to doing it this way.

 

1. It is more efficient as most of the information is just contained in two poses, the pose driving the other poses doesn't take up much memory.

 

2. It is possible to have the "both together" pose control the right and left poses differently so maybe one side smiles more. You can even have it so that one side leads the motion a little before the other which then catches up (it is possible to set the relationship keys at any part of the pose slider). A-symmetry can add a lot to a characters face - particularly an old or wacky one.

 

Another thing that you might want to consider is driving the poses with bone rotations (a simple smart-skin does it for me) You can have the bones around the face where they are easy to see. You can then have an on/off pose for turning the bone visibility off.

 

Anyway, just some thoughts. It is allways worth putting some thought into rigging before you get going in my opinion (not that I am the greatest expert).

 

Good luck

[John Keates]

Oh, I forgot...

 

You could possibly loose some geometry on the ears allong the helix (just the one spline furthest from the head). It wouln't save much animation time but could serve as an exercise in splinemanship. I rekon that you could get a similar shape with fewer splines and a bit of bias tweeking.... maybe.

[strohbehn]

Please take a look at this 10 second (2.6Mb - QT Sorenson 3) lipsync clip and fire away with suggestions. It's definitely time for some objective input!

 

Lighting and textures were not my main focus here. I just wanted to try my hand at lipsync first, test my rig, and learn the interface.

 

http://www.scc.net/~mbs/lipsynctest16.mov

 

Also, I'd like to compress this further to get below the 1Mb file size limit so I can post it on this forum and not on a separate web page. What's the best format to use?

 

Thanks!

[KenH]

That's great lipsyncing. Obviously the expressions are abit muted. Amazing first effort.

[Paul Forwood]

Hi, Strohbehn.

 

Just wanted to complement you on your modelling skills. You are obviously a quick learner to have pulled this much together so fast. Well done.

 

I don't really want to critisize your animation but I would like to see you run through this one again with more exaggeration, just for the fun of it.

 

I look forward to watching your progress.

 

Thanks for posting.

 

Paul Forwood