Facial Bones Driven by sliders

[chudofsinister]

Help....anyone..............?

[madmac3d]

bump....

sorry, but I can't help.... I just thought that this would be a great idea too...

there was something similar to this mentioned recently on the Eek character rigging thread. I think someone has written something like that for maya.... (edt) This (http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=20832&perpage=20&pagenumber=5) link

[pappuftp]

Well , its an often used procedure in animation and so the solution exists..
u might want to use custom attributes with sliders or spinners with a defined range ( say form 0 to 100 ) .. then reactor control the bones to these custom attributes.. finally link the custom attributes to your seperate cubes or sliders and set rig such that when u move ur slider 10 units the custom attributes change to a set level to reflect the change in the position of the bones and thus get ur desired expression when the slkider moves 10 units ..
keep adding the tweaks at regular intervals ..

u may want to use pen rigging utils -http://paulneale.com/

this adds as a null modifier on top og ur objects modifier stack and is designed to aid in custom attribute work..
this has a nice feature wherein after adjusting the sliders/spinners u can save these new values as a preset and thgus after having set various presets u can recall them at will .. and so won't have to guess what paraemeters u set to achive particular results.

so workflow would be to first create ur custom attributes in the number required , then reactor control/wire ur bones to each attribute as desired, finally set ur presets ( to get laugh/smile etc on ur face model ) and then reactor controll/wire these presets / individual attributes to ur sliders or boxes or what have u..

of course u might not want these extra boxes now because u already have ur sliders and custom attributes with presets

[bolbacool]

hello,

You might take a look at the Eek's rigging setup :

http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&postid=1185539#post1185539

I'm currently helping him to make a script that allow to make poses with custom attributes, and to animate these poses like a morpher.

Stay tuned on the thread, I'll probably post a first "release" of my script soon (you can already see some screenshots on the last page).

Best Regards

bolbacool

[NilreMK]

Ive developed a maxscript for this purpose at my job. It does exactly what you want but I'm not sure if I can share it publicly. It works with a combinaison of scripted modifiers, scripted controllers, wire controllers and manipulator sliders.

Basicly you add my scripted modifier to a bone, then in the modifier panel you click on "Select Manipulator" and select the slider that you want to use. Each slider control a particular shape, for exemple you could have "Smile", "Mad". "Sad" sliders. Finaly you click "Set End Position" and move the bone to where you want it to go. Thats it. The sliders are generic manipulator sliders that comes with 3dsMax.

Eventually simply moving the "Smile" slider moves every mouth dummies to the correct position like a morph. The translations are vector based, so you can go lower than 0% and higher than 100%. I also use my scripted plugin to control bone rotations, by using look-at controllers.

I'm not sure why anyone would use this over morph for pre-rendered animations. I've developed this system because morph animation is very expensive to do in realtime. With my system I tried to combine morph's strengh (ease of animation) with bone's strenght (low ram/cpu requirement).

[chrisdejoya]

Download Anipose from www.chuggnut.com

Basically what it does is act like Set Driven Key for max.
Meaning, you set the slider to one position, pose the objects (in your case, bones) the way you want, then then key them in at the current slider value. Then manipulating the slider morphs between the two key poses.

You can set it to work on sets of bones, so you can have separate controls for the eyelids, brows, mouth, and bones can overlap between bone sets.

The UI is not that good, but you can probably dissect for the bits of code you need to make your own UI.

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