CGTalk - Facial animation

Nanoflux

03-20-2002, 03:18 AM

Ok, here's the deal.

I'm working on a project where 2-3 characters are going to speak to each other and one character is nearly finished. The other two I thought would be modifications and alterations of this main character. I've played around with some morphing, trying out the world of lipsync and I was wondering....

Setting up morphtargets for a character is a tedious job, especially when he is required to produce some complicated dialogue - so i have to have some 13 morphtargets for this character alone. When completing my two other characters, they will have to be equally rigged with multiple morphtargets. The question is - is there some technique that allows me to shape the mouth and face and then export this information to another character? So, when I've set up these 13 targets... I can quickly (and with some tweeking no doubt) re-use the basic mouthshapes on other characters? I was thinking in the way of the FFD modifiers, but with a lot more control and ability to save the data somehow? I heard that Maya has this ability or something like it but does Max?

Please post some thoughts and tips if you have them.

LFShade

03-20-2002, 05:20 AM

To the best of my knowledge, MAX offers no such functionality. Would make for an interesting plugin, though:)

phyle

03-20-2002, 09:45 AM

You can use the old head and put your new head model in as one of its morph targets, then leave that morph target on 100 percent all the time.
I dont know how well it would work, thats what i do if i want to make changes to a head after ive already made all the morph targets..

Nanoflux

03-20-2002, 02:15 PM

Interesting.

It´s certainly worth a shot or two. Though it's a shame no such fuctionality exists - to be able to move vertexes around based on som sort of "cage" or someting and then reapply that to another model.

Darn!

:)

toonman

03-21-2002, 04:46 AM

Hey Nano. There are two possible approaches you could take on this one. The first method is a scripting method, but it'd require that both heads had exactly the same vertex counts and ordering. Say you have HeadA and HeadB, and you've got morph targets HeadA_targetA, HeadA_targetB, etc. Now, you want to create HeadB's targets. The script would compare HeadA and HeadA_targetA, and find which vertices have been moved (through some sort of edge length checking functions, I guess), and store them in an array, along with the amounf of the change (a coefficient between the total length of the original edges and the new length of the changed ones). Than info would be applied to the HeadB_targetA model, but that's why same vertex counts and ordering are criticall. This, obviously, introduces some important issues in the modeling process.
The other approach (with which I can't mess with at this point, since I'm no C programmer) is to do a sort of 'volumetric analisys' of the mesh to get the info, and apply that info to the new mesh, taking into account its volume. I'm sure it's doable, but I'd really need to think of it, cause I guess a lot of ray intersect tests would be involved (or maybe through a point-cloud sorta approach).
Anyway, it's doable, but it'd take time to develop. Cheers!

mhb3d

03-21-2002, 05:54 AM

Hi Nanoflux

Heres what u need

visit

http://www.scriptspot.com/ (Free max scripts)

download Morpherfunctions 1.0

check the latest scripts for this.

allows u to export and import your animation data from the morpher plugin
plus much more.

Tip:

You say u have 13 morph targets - is that just for the mouth if not then I would suggest to have at least 9 basic for the mouth.
I working on a facial animation as well, I would be keen to see what u have done so far

Nanoflux

03-21-2002, 11:43 AM

Toonman you're a genious. But unfortunately I'm no programmer. I can make dots move in QBasic but thats it :) It's a sound analysis of the problem though and a good way to fix it!

mhb3d - thanks for the link! Hope this does the trick. Get back to you later!

9 for the mouthshapes, the the rest is for blinks, brows up/down and so forth

You are all worth you weight in gold!

Cee ya!

Nanoflux

03-25-2002, 03:19 PM

Mhb3d.

To see what I've done so far you can go to

http://www.crewofone.com/wip

Check out the animations and remember - its all work in progress. :)

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