facial rig, learning

[Zoogie]

love the sample, Stefan,
looking forward to seeing your "how I did it" notes.
coming from XSI that would help me a lot. Of course I have a lot more to learn. (I was just getting the hang of rigging in xsi when I started using Blender)

I learnt a lot from your free animating tutorials on 3dtutorial.com (Oh in trying to link your tutorials , I noticed the 3dtutorial site has changed , so I'm not sure if they are there anymore...but they were great and to the point.)
Is your whole studio moving to blender, or are you using it for personal projects.
How is your transitioning?


cheers

Zoogie

[moh-taia]

hi StefanA ,
nice animation ^_^
this site has some video tutorials under Animation section

http://www.geneome.net/index.php/blender-tutorials/

they might help as a start point

cheers

[StefanA]

Hello Zoogie,


I learnt a lot from your free animating tutorials on 3dtutorial.com (Oh in trying to link your tutorials , I noticed the 3dtutorial site has changed , so I'm not sure if they are there anymore...but they were great and to the point.)


I happy that they got some attention and that people learned a bit from them. I'm not that good at making video tutorials, but at least they show something :)


Is your whole studio moving to blender, or are you using it for personal projects.
How is your transitioning?
Zoogie

It's just me at home, our studio is using Maya for the most part. We do however use Blender for a few things, UV Unwrap and Sculpt for making blendeshapes. At home though I'm a 100% Blender3D user.

regards
stefan andersson

[Zoogie]

Thanks for the reply Stefan,
I just checked out your Blog and I must say I had some of the same frustrations learning Blender.....(still do every now and then ) but I am definitely working through it.

Anyways, lets see some more of those tests.

cheers

Zoogie

[KLasKAERU]

Hi ,
Nice facial rig .

Being a long time blender user i would just ask you what's the big deal about blender up axis being Z and not Y ?
Just curious .
And also there was some explanation about that out there on CGsociety .

Peace :-).

[StefanA]

The Y axis issue

Mainly it's because most major applications ( even 3dsmax has it as an Option, which is what I'm asking for ) have Y as the "up axis". Pretty basic if you think from a camera pov. XY, Y is up X is to the side.... and.... Z is for depth (hence the name Zbuffer).
So for many of us that comes from a background with maya, softimage, houdini, motion builder... etc. we have it in our backbones that the axis is Y for up. So when you are editing FCurves ( here called something completely off as "IPO Curves" ) you are constantly making misstakes.

So, I've posted at blender.org that I would like to have it as an OPTION to have Y as my "up axis". This would also be benefit when you are exporting models. FBX , OBJ, COLLADA, everyone of them you have to rotate in -90 degrees when you import it to another program.

regards
stefan andersson

[RogerWickes]

I understand your xyz thing. it should be simple to have Gravity not just as a slider but as three XYZ fields. Couldn't you just always model in front view? Blender doesnt care about anything z-related, does it? Particles don't care. Fluids and cloth/softbody is the only thing where world Gravity is used.

[koots]

I love it! I would be Very interested in learning more!

[StefanA]

I understand your xyz thing. it should be simple to have Gravity not just as a slider but as three XYZ fields. Couldn't you just always model in front view? Blender doesnt care about anything z-related, does it? Particles don't care. Fluids and cloth/softbody is the only thing where world Gravity is used.

I think you are missing my point, this has nothing to do with gravity, modeling or simulation. This has to do what you associate your world coordinates with.
When you have as I worked with Y=up X=side Z=depth for 10+ years it's buried in your backbone. So alot of the times when you are editing, you don't look in the viewport sometimes. Because you know how the curve should look, so you do a quick edit and then check it. Or you keep grabbing the wrong curves all the time.

So this has to do with Character Animation, nothing else.

regards
stefan andersson

[StefanA]

here is the latest update.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=y1gn30YvIU8

on the todo list

* fix weighting
* teeth
* tongue
* eyes
* eyelid rig
* texturing of everything

regards
stefan andersson

[KLasKAERU]

Ah ok , i understand about the y axis thing , habits have hard time ...

But i think/hope that 2.5 will give you the option to change that .

Nice animation , maybe the SSS is a little bit too hard ?

Have you tried to do shape key with sculpt mode ?
Last time i've been nicely surprised about that , i found it was a nice workflow .

Peace :-).

[koots]

StefanA,
Would you mind doing a tutorial of your work? U are a very good artist and I would be willing to pay some $$ for a detailed tut. I am really looking forward to an update!

[Zoogie]

awesome Stefan... The little man has got a lot of character.... a very opinionated little man, right?
I think I am learning something from it. .,I can see where workflow may be enhanced by focusing on the animation and then add the eye animation later (so as not to be distracted by it.).
Am I inferring right or am I reading too much into your technique. Is this your general method and does it matter at all?
Thanks for sharing


Zoogie

[StefanA]

Koots: I will at some point make a tutorial, the problem I have now is time... being a fulltime 3D artist and also a dad.. well.. I don't even get enough time to develope my blender skills. But, I will try and make a video tutorial. Any recommendations for screen capture software on OSX or Ubuntu 64bit? (using mostly Ubuntu on my mac).

Zoogie: the animations I've posted shouldn't be seen as actual animation :) They are simply just me moving the bones around to see if the rig behaves as expected. When I do animate I have these steps that I follow

* blocking part I, setting up the important poses animating with stepped curves. Some facial blocking (no mouth).
* blocking part II, set inbetweens in the blocking. Still using stepped Curves
* blocking part III, set inbetweens for the inbetweens. Still using stepped Curves
* smoothing, convert all the stepped curves to spline curves. Refine and adjust timing
* facial animation, once the body animation is done (or as done it can be) I start blocking the face. I repeat the same steps as I did with the body.
* eye animation, now I turn the shading on so that I see the iris. And I animate the eyes and surrounding controls.
* Squash and Strech, added as a last little final touch (if needed).

When working with commercials I spend a lot of time with the first blocking phase. My guess is that I probably send about 10 variations to the client for approval. If you nail that first blocking really good the rest will just follow smoothly and no surprises will follow.

KLasKAERU: the SSS is a tad to much now, I haven't spend that mcuh time yet thinking about shading and texturing. I use the sculpt tool all the time! it's one of the features that made me use blender in the first place.

thanks for all the comments everyone.

regards
stefan

[koots]

I use camtasia. I think it is prob a bit more expensive than a few of the other programs. But it is such an easy program to use.

[StefanA]

camtasia is Windows only, I use Linux (and occasionally OSX).

[Zoogie]

Aaahh, great info thanks Stefan.
* facial animation, once the body animation is done (or as done it can be) I start blocking the face. I repeat the same steps as I did with the body.Somehow I never translated some of the pose to pose technique to facial animation.


* eye animation, now I turn the shading on so that I see the iris. And I animate the eyes and surrounding controls.
I actually never would have thought of this one... ie having the eye shading off while doing the rest of the stuff.. It does make a lot of sense. Definitely going to try that when I get to facial animation.

Also the method of getting the blocking approved by client makes a lot of sense.
Good nugget of info right there.


There is a screencast here on recording tutorials in Ubuntu
http://www.showmedo.com/videos/video?name=1230000&fromSeriesID=123
I havent deployed Ubuntu yet , so I havent tried it myself.

Thanks again,

Zoogie

[StefanA]

latest update, too tired to write something about it ( 3:02AM )

http://youtube.com/watch?v=C7niuUmbFjM

[StefanA]

so I've made the first lipsync test. Less than an hour of work, so don't read into the animation too much :)

http://sanders3d.googlepages.com/lips.mpg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIWxbP8I7XQ


Just a quicktest to see if the shapes and the rig was working. I've noticed a few things while I was animating... so it's back to the drawing board... well I need to add a few controls that I need and re-design a few of the shapes that I have. But all in all it performed as I had hoped, and the "issues" I noticed was something that I thought would become an issue.

regards
stefan

[BubaBrown]

This is one of most advanced facial animation in Blender I have seen (more for my liking to be compared with Elephants Dream). Good luck with your progress :-)

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