Morphing textures

[anakinskywalker]

Well!!! why dont you animate the textures in some other application and then apply it to the model. It would be simple .. but i guess it would be difficult to control timing later on. Interesting approach though.

May be you should give the layered textured a try with blendind thrown it a bit if you need to control the texture timing through Maya.

So like you could have different clips of animation to different layers and blend them as needed.

[alexx]

doing the textures and the blends in a paint app wont be the problem.. i think what stefan means is more the problem, that you can not paint all the transitions between the different poses (you can but you dont want)..

morphing the textures i think can not be done the ways you want it..

but maybe one idea to follow that one would be to animate the UVs of the surface to get the different expressions..

i think that can be done

(you can animate your UVs, by selecting them and then in the veiwport hit "s" key)

cheers

alexx

[klingspor]

anakinskywalker, your reply won't work for me because in your suggestion the textures aren't actually morphed but simply blended: Looks kinda strange to have a 50% smile and 50% frown blended on your face :D
What I'd like is for Maya to calculate the inbetweens, in the way a 2D vector program or standalone morpher could to it!

but maybe one idea to follow that one would be to animate the UVs of the surface to get the different expressions..

I've thought about what you said and tried it on a sphere, but unfortunately, it doesn't come out very well... in other words, it lacks the detailed control I need to create true facial expressions.

It would be so nice to just draw the faces on paper, scan them and have Maya do the rest... :hmm:




edit: spelling...

[alexx]

hehe..

the button you are looking for is right besides the "make nice" button in the globals ;)

[klingspor]

Originally posted by alexx
hehe..

the button you are looking for is right besides the "make nice" button in the globals ;)

:beer:

Still it's quite strange that seemingly nobody uses "my" method - to me, it seems like the most straight-forward way to animate comic and anime characters.
I'll have to check some Japanese sites as they have tons of experience in this field and have surely come up with a simple solution!

And just maybe it's far closer than Japan and on highend3d waiting for me... alas, I can't check as they are, once again, offline...

[Lyr]

I haven't tried this yet, but I suppose you could draw the facial expressions with curves and attach paint effects brushes to them, and make blendshapes for the curves.

[MasonDoran]

keyword is pixels have no relation to vectors. Morphing depends on vectors and the calculation of the coordinates between them creates the tween. Tweening or morphing pixels is not possible, you would have to still hand draw every frame of the morphing(tweening)texture.


If u wrap a texture around a 3d object....you can morph the texture inadvertantly when you morph the object, even Photoshop does this with its liquid filter...it creates a grid of vectors similar to a UV map and then morphs those vectors and the texture follows suit.


What u want has been done before, but what i have seen is they took a 2d animation or movie and projected it as an animated texture onto the object. If they wanted to change the timing...they would have to change the 2d animation in Aftereffects or Premiere or whatever. ie: A tv showing a film.

Also, using the layered texture method is possible(no tweening or morphing though) if u use stepped key frames so that there is no blending between textures. You could then create Set driven key controls to switch between the different textures. This would be hell if u had twenty different textures.

[MasonDoran]

one suggestion though if you are spline savvy.

If you can model your facial expressions(using a flattened model) and use blendshapes...and then render out in an orthographic and using the surface shader to lose all light info...this would allow you to have tweened facial animation that would still be projected onto the surface as an animated texture or using the layered texture method.

[klingspor]

Originally posted by 2byts
[B]keyword is pixels have no relation to vectors. Morphing depends on vectors and the calculation of the coordinates between them creates the tween. Tweening or morphing pixels is not possible, you would have to still hand draw every frame of the morphing(tweening)texture.
Actually, it is very well possible to morph pixel-based images. Maybe you remember in the mid-nineties, it was quite a fad! Surely you've seen the video of the womans face morph into a leopard? I've used those programs back then and the results would be quite acceptable for what I had in mind here...

one suggestion though if you are spline savvy.

If you can model your facial expressions(using a flattened model) and use blendshapes...and then render out in an orthographic and using the surface shader to lose all light info...this would allow you to have tweened facial animation that would still be projected onto the surface as an animated texture or using the layered texture method.
This is more or less what I'll probably be doing, however I'll just be using the splines directly on the model and blend them whenever needed - so I can just skip the textures altogether. Not as elegant as I had first envisioned, but likely to get the job done with less fuss.

[MasonDoran]

yeah i remember a Michael Jackson video that did this, as well as Willow....what was used to make that? I thought it would be a compositing software

[MasonDoran]

i am curious though..i suspect thes appz behave something like the photoshop filter liquify

http://www.morpheussoftware.net/

or

http://www.stoik.com/morphman/morphman.htm

[klingspor]

I'm sorry I can't come up with any links, but since the software I remember using was on Win 3.1 it probably won't be of much use anyway. The MorphMan you referred to seems like what I'm talking about, though!

The way it works is simple, and unless I am totally unaware of a few major features in the liquify-tool, has nothing to do with that: You open two Bitmaps and then start positioning a few numbered points which are to be morphed together later on - e.g. the eye of a girl on one side and the eye of a cat on the other. Then you'd just hit calculate, wait a ridiculous amount of time (ohh, I loved my 486 back then!) and voilà, you have a video or single frames of those Bitmaps morphed together!

It strikes me as strange that this once so over-used technique has become totally forgotten today, I haven't seen it ANYWHERE lately!

[wrend]

heh, i remember the piece of soft your taling about, w the example girl-cat morph. it was shareware i reckon, so it may still lurk out there...

[anakinskywalker]

I remember another software called Elastic Reality. Its still floating around somewhere.

[Kabab]

I just had a brainwave..

Model some splines for the different expresions you want and create a blend shape.

Then project the blend shape onto your face.

So now when you animated your blend shape the project one should follow :)

Now just apply a painfx brush to the curve thats been projected onto the surface, there are lots of brushes which look hand drawn.

And your done

:applause:

*edit* here is an example..

http://www.concentric.com.au/blend.gif

If the iamge doesn't work tell me i can't tell from here.

edit fixed the pic its dodgy but you get the idea

[gmask]

It is conceivable that somebody could write such a texture morphing plugin for Maya but I know of none.

After Effects has this capability with is reshape filter but if you were using After Effects you could just animate with vectors and do your lipo sync there.

However if you really are after an anime look then you really should just create a set of mouth shapes and then keyframe the appropriate ones using a dopesheet method.

[DarkBane]

I know that this is probably a tedious approach, but why don't you animate your character first. Then figure out the timing. Once all the timing is correct, completely animate the facials and apply the face animation as an image sequence.

It would be a lot harder, but it's possible.

I would still look for a plug-in first.


GOOD LUCK

I'd like to see how it comes out. Keep us updated

[klingspor]

Originally posted by anakinskywalker
I remember another software called Elastic Reality. Its still floating around somewhere.

Hmmm, in the back of my mind I seem to remeber a version of Elastic Reality for Maya... Google doesn't come up with anything useful though, so I'm probably wrong!


@Kabab: That's a very interesting idea - the pic doesn't work by the way. I'll be trying that right now, it seems quite close to what I had in mind! :applause:

[klingspor]

Kabab. Sir, I praise thee! :beer:

Your suggestion was the closest I'll probably get to my original idea, but I'm actually starting to like this: I can't believe something so simple would do it! The way the projected curves actually STAY ON the face is just magnificent!

Now one more question: Is there something like a "Project surface" feature? That should prove useful for filling the inside of the mouth etc...

[Kabab]

Actually i read through the thread again and someone suggested it on the 1st page but hey great minds think alike right :D

Yeah i wasn't sure if the blend shape would work on the project curve and it did !! :applause:

Also using painfx brushes should give you a wide choice of brushes.

I've also been thinking if you where to project close curves (circles) onto your surface do a trim so you get a hole then plannar that trim surface you could make it a different color and have the painfx brush around the edge. Then just use blend shapes to morph the shape would you something like a mouth.

Anyway glad we could help !!

[sric]

Elastic Reality is the program most and still used in the picture biz for "Morphing". I think that's what they used to do some small jobs on LOTR, such as Bilbo taking Gandalfs hat in his house .....the shot wasn't 100% so they tweaked it with a 4 or 5 frame morph.

The SGI version had more features than the PC or Mac version and cost a lot more. It had some warping features I don't think were in the cheaper versions.

Last I heard it was selling for $800 us for the PC and it was owned by Avid. I'm not sure if it's still for sale.

Cheers
Fred

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