Getting expression in this SubD Frog

[Jimstein]

I have no idea. Cant you do it somthing like this?
http://www.lightwave3d.com/contests/dec-02/winners/Tutorials/Layout/Demian_Kurejwowski/index.html

[4dartist]

Not Really that i know of.. I need to beable to deform the Eyeball and the Eyelid to make expressions.. say he gets Angry, so the eyeball and lid will deform the way we all know angry works but then he looks off to the right. Well that would be hard to do if i were using bones cause then the angry eyeball would move inside the angrey eyelids and probably cause geometry interecting. When really the deformation should stay the same while the eyeball slides around in it, that way the geometry never intersects and he can look anywhere using any expression.

I tried just using the eyelids to drive expression but it just didn't perform good enough.. I must admit tho im not the best at character expression :( a department i need a lot of work in. .Technical and Artisticly. Any advice would be great thanx!

Oh i got Deformers to work, but Taper Twist and things light that prob. won't cut it.. but im going to give them a try..

[Mwai Kasamale]

add floating eyebrows

[4dartist]

We had thought about this.. but.. It just doesn't seem to fit the character.. Or the style we are going for.. Man eyebrows would make life so much easier, alas I don't think floating eyebrows are an option. :( I might play with that a little in what time i have left today tho.. We'll see
Thanks for the idea tho 8)~ Very appriciated

[SplineGod]

Originally posted by 4dartist
We had thought about this.. but.. It just doesn't seem to fit the character.. Or the style we are going for.. Man eyebrows would make life so much easier, alas I don't think floating eyebrows are an option. :( I might play with that a little in what time i have left today tho.. We'll see
Thanks for the idea tho 8)~ Very appriciated
What I would try doing is to "rotate" the eyeballs via morphs. I would then use bones to do the facial expressions. This will allow the eyes to move but also allow the eyes and lids to be deformed by the bones. I would also look at using motion mixer to blend between facial poses. Mike RB has a tutorial that shows how to use motion mixer to blend between hand poses that can easily be adapted to bones in a face and using a slider panel. The same slider panel can also have the morphs in it as well.

[tOmdOr]

here is what you are looking for
check out this thread

http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=37417

kretin posts there a scene file with an eye ball that can rotate and still use the diffrent deformers (shear, taper...)
basicly it use a bone for the rotation of the eye and nulls for the control of taper\shear deformation and because it calculate the bone deform first it works like magic

and again.. thank you kretin

[4dartist]

I read through most of that stuff and it seems very close to what i need. I'll start reverse engineering his scene's, altho i perty much understand.. But I need to take it a little step further, i need to beable to drive the eye with morphtargets or bones to make it shape into an expression but still beable to rotate underneath that expression... So instead of making it just a flatter shpere like he did and rotating and keeping that flat sphere shape i need lots of dif shapes.. For expressions.. I read somthing he said about a deform cage and i think that would prob be a big help, but themanuel says nothing about this that i can find :(, But im going to be working on this all day so maybe ill figure something out that works.. Thanks for your posts and time guys! I appriciate it very much.

:EDIT: look what i found 8)~ Going to read it now hehe
http://www.lightwave3d.com/tutorials/animation/deform-cage/

:EDIT: Nevermind.. that wont work...

[4dartist]

SplineGod.. Holy cow, that sounds tricky lol, it does sound workable tho.. I wonder how hard it would be to get good eye animation with morphtargets... Worth a shot tho.. Ill give it a go today 8) Thanks

:EDIT: Ok.. wow i tried rotating the eyeballs with morphs lol and it doesn't work really good at all.. Considering Morphs are liner.. so i would have to make like 3 morphs for ever rotation and somehow blend between them.. i guess there is a way to do that i have read but that seems like a massive project to get to work, But if i could get some control to drive all that easily then using bones to deform the eyeball sounds possible.. hum.. ill keep workin' 8)

[kretin]

Check later on in the Eye Deformation thread, I posted a deforming eye that fits the bill perfectly, in fact I'll be using the technique on a frog very soon...

You have full control over the scale, position and taper amount of the eye using just one null. Actually, here's the test scene I posted in the other thread...

Eye Test (http://www.zerogravity.com.au/lw/EyeDeformTest2.zip)

Larry's method of morphing will make it a pain to look at stuff unless you did a complex set of jointmorphs. And as you say, the linear thing I imagine wouldn't be nice... The above method still uses an eye target for where the eye/s are looking.

What I would do for 2 eyes is create a deformation target for each eye, then parent both of those to a null inbetween the eyes. That way you can move/rotate the master null for most of your movement, and shouldn't need to move the individual targets much or at all...

And you can still use morphs for the eyelids...

Although the example is on a single eye object, since it's all driven by bones you can include the setup in a character with seperate weights for a) the left and right eyeball, and b) the eyeball + eyelids. So you'd have 4 weights for the eyes all up.

Deformation cages, I just realised today, don't work as they overwrite all other movement and rotation of the object :(

[kretin]

Oh, also, you should do most of your expressive morphs with the eyelids "without" deforming the shape, so that any shape deforming you do merely enhances the expression. Check out what I mean with this test anim of a salamander...

TaylorTest (http://www.zerogravity.com.au/jonny/3Ddig/Pond/ZGE-TaylorTest.avi)

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