Veggie Tales Facial Animations

[bigfatMELon]

At one point some time ago they were using a custom mouth shader thingy along with regular set driven keys.

-jl

[Ibanezhead]

Custom Shader? Would that include painted texture maps? I had always heard that they were just animating texture maps, but it just doesn't look like it. Then in the "extras" on the dvd they show the characters in Maya, and I noticed that there seemed to be a NURBS curve for the mouth. But I am not familiar with NURBS in Maya, so I'm not sure how they would do that.

Vic

[dmcgrath]

Its possible that the nurbs curve was constrained to the face, and they had blendshapes made out of the curve. Then the curve was a driver for the shaders, that would only show up during rendering, for speed during the animation process.

[michaelcomet]

In the old Softimage days before I was there they did literally use texture maps. It was so bad they had to actually animate the mouth in a separate window at a separate time without being able to see the eyes and such I think.

The newer stuff for Maya like Jonah uses a proprietary shader as mentioned. The curves has blendshapes on it that drive the shader. The shader takes the final curve shape and creates color, bump, spec and trans mapping on the object to make it look like a 3D mouth.

So basically its a curve with blendshape into a shading plugin.

[Ibanezhead]

Thanks guys.

I guess I am a little confused as to how the blendshape drives the shader. As the blendshape is animated, is it driving the switch between the visibility of corresponding painted textures in a layered shader? Or is it a procedural shader? If procedural, then what type? You say its an in-house plugin, so is it pretty much a lost cause for me to try and accomplish this?

thanks again,

Vic

[michaelcomet]

No no...
blendshape drives the curve. The curve is just a regular curve with blendshapes to animate it.

The curve shape then goes into the shader.

[Ibanezhead]

The curve shape then goes into the shader.

Ok, this then, is what I don't understand... I understand using blendshapes to control the curve, but I don't understand the curve driving the shader. Is this only accomplished by writing a plugin like they have, or is there a step by step way a guy like me can get this to work?

Thanks,

Vic

[michaelcomet]

No you can't do this unless you do a lot of math and special coding and write a C/C++ plugin.

[Ibanezhead]

Thanks...

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