WIP - Little Girl facial poses

[coreybastiaans]

Looks really good to me. I especially like the style of this character and how small the mouth becomes. extreme is good.

[Kadastrophic]

The only thing that seems to bug me is her eyes/eye lids. Aside from the one image where she has them shut she doesn't change them at all... very static.

example: In the pout-sad frame maybe bring up her bottom eye lids.

[bstout]

i agree with Kadastropics comment on the eyelids.
Overall I feel that the neutral is too round leaving you nowhere to go fi you want the eyes to open more.
Also the mouth goes extremely small, nice - why not extremely open as well -unless that's too out of character for her.

nice work

[tankut]

Thank you very much for the comments, they are really helpful.

I may have painted myself into a corner by setting my neutral pose with very wide eyes, but I think that can be patched using a corrective blendshape to all poses, or keeping the blink action constantly at around 10-15 percent when animating (which is a possible workaround). I'll try and see, and post the results.

The really wide mouth is a good idea, kind of reminds me of Lucy in Peanuts. I'll tweak one in. Thanks!

[bstout]

keeping the eyeblink blendshape at 10 to 15 percent should do it.
i've had to dp that before myself.

have fun

B

[tankut]

I've just tested the blink action, and found out it's not working.

You see, Maya (and probably other packages too) interpolates the morph vertex positions (blendshapes) linearly. And since the eyes are so large and round, the lids have to travel a goodly and curved distance to close - and they penetrate the eyeball on the way :(

http://www.3dunya.com/files/kiz/blinkError.jpg

and a quick render of the action : quicktime7/h.264(41K) (http://www.3dunya.com/files/kiz/kiz_blinkAction01.mov) or mpeg1(140K) (http://www.3dunya.com/files/kiz/blinkerror.mpg)

I don't know how I'll fix this, but hope to find a solution tomorrow.

[richardoud]

He Tankut,

I had the same problem with my character.. i just made three morph target stages of the eye closing. Slightly closed, halfway closed and closed all the way. After this i just applied the set driven key to my sliders!

Hope this helps..

[bstout]

richardoud's solution works.
i use joints. one joint at the center of the eye. its child at the eyelid.
duplicate give teh duplicate half teh rotation of the first. weight the upper eyelid to the two joints and away you go.
repeat for lower lid, of course.

[tankut]

A joint has the advantage of working in arcs, which is a Good Thing.

I considered both approaches and decided to try Richardoud's intermediate blendshapes way, since I'm already in the process of tweaking/adding new poses. If it doesn't work, I can graft in a joint down the pipeline, whereas adding new blendshapes (after/during rigging) had tried to bite me before :)

For now, I am trying to keep it as simple as possible.

[chesterjoe]

Nice design! I like it a lot. and the facial poses are looking good too, great job!

[tankut]

Thank you all for the helpful comments and encouragement..

I tweaked almost all blendshapes, and added a few more. It all took longer than I anticipated.

Anyway here they are, still warm from the render:

http://www.3dunya.com/files/kiz/tn_mouthpos02_070629_cam1.jpg (http://www.3dunya.com/files/kiz/mouthpos02_070629_cam1_websize.jpg)
click to view
http://www.3dunya.com/files/kiz/tn_mouthpos02_070629_cam2.jpg (http://www.3dunya.com/files/kiz/mouthpos02_070629_cam2_websize.jpg)
click to view

Maybe a few more tweaks tomorrow, and the blendshape bases are done (I hope). It appears I can't open the mouth very wide without destroying the style.

What do you think? What should I add or change?

[VM]

she's very very cute. I would try using some other technique for facial setup, not blendshapes. you can always use bs for corrections, but it's often used to have a combination of tools for the setup. an ideea would be to use wire deformers (in maya, I don't know what you use) around the mouth and for the eyebrows. or maybe joints, clusters... there are many possibilities. the curves can also be made influence objects on a smooth bind, but wires are better because they give you even deformations. I'm trying to do a setup like this myslef right now, and I'm trying to find out how to get the wires to work fast - when you add 2 or more wires, by default the interaction becomes really slow. I presume that doing separate wires on separate meshes and then adding them as blendshapes to the final mesh should work, but I'm trying to find the problem though... maybe they should be parallel deformers, or assigned to different deformer sets... so they don't interfere. otherwise, one wire deformer on a mesh seems fast enough. wires have become faster in later versions of maya. anyway, for the eyelids you can have wires too, or joints - since your character eyes are spheres it shouldn't be a huge problem... the Pixar old way of dealing with eyelids is a simple extra object for the lids, another sphere, not part of the face mesh, I'm sure you've seen this stuff. that's the easiest way to do eyelids because it doesn't involve deformers at all, unless you need some shape controll, in which case it does, but still, it's easy to deal with. I like the girl's eyes going abruptly into the head. Anyway, my advice is to not use only blendshapes for her setup. facial animation with only blendshapes isn't cool. each shape might look great, but the interpolation, as you well discovered, is linear, and the resulting look is nasty and repetitive. look at hoodwinked. it's hard to pull out something rich and organic out of bs. also, you don't have shape control over the mouth and eyebrows for example, which for a cartoony character is a big deal. I mean, it's ideal to be able to shape that mouth into a custom shape, or 'draw' the eyebrows into a unique pose. besides that, it's cool to be able to 'model' the face as you animate it, it gives you more freedom... ok, one thing you could also do if you want to stick to blendshapes, is add some face clusters on top, to help shape the mouth during animation, maybe a central cluster that can move the mouth with a falloff, left-right and up down, maybe scale, rotate... could be cool :D could help with animating a mouth talking somewhere on a side, not center. just offsetting the mouth and getting some round movements and some jaw movement can add soooo much richness and warmth to the face :D hope my advice helped. have fun with your face setup!

[tankut]

Thank you Virgil for the insight. Yes, I am using Maya, experimented with the existing blendshapes and found them a bit lacking as you said. I was looking at a series of Robin Hood commercials [1] (http://www.richardrosenman.com/project/?cid=73) [2] (http://www.richardrosenman.com/project/?cid=73) [3] (http://www.richardrosenman.com/project/?cid=72) at Richard Rosenman (http://www.richardrosenman.com/animation/) for inspiration and technique. There is no way I can get that kind of deformations with bs. I am beginning to think of a hybrid setup, bs + wire? bones? wrinkle deformers?

Since this is a personal project without a deadline, I guess I can afford the time for some R&D, prowl around for tutorials and articles on the subject..

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