Facial expression

[Iain McFadzen]

OK firstly make sure you are using the Morpher modifier and not the Morph compound object. The former is a barycentric controller which allows you to mix and animate any number of channels simultaneously without requiring that every target be present in the scene. The latter is a throw-back to Max 2.x before the modifier version existed, and is far harder to use, is much less flexible, and requires that all your targets are in te scene which makes for really heavy files.

Right now that's out the way...

Personally I've tried using both bones and morphing for facial animation, and I've come to the conclusion that a mixture of the two is ideal. The problem with a bones set up is that it takes an absolute age to weight the mesh correctly (you really need to do it by manually entering vertex weights, Comet has a scripts which allows you to do this). On the other hand the problem with Morphs is that they are interpolated linearly, which has a tendency to look a little robotic. I've found that using bones for the jaw movement (and possibly the eyebrows), and morphs for all the subtle movement gives the best results. It doesn't take long to set up weights on big broad-scale bones like the jaw, and you get nice arcs when you rotate them instead of straight vert translations.

Here's a few poses I set up last week using this technique, took me about 3 hours altogether:

http://www.scotch.vi2.com/crittage/pus.gif

Couple of other things to consider:

There is a Digimation plugin called Morph-O-Matic which allows for non-linear morph interpolation, but IMO it's not worth the extra work or expense.

If you plan on animating with Character Studio it wold probably be best to use straight morphs, since Skin doesn't work all that well with Biped and having both Skin and Physique in the same stack is just asking for instability problems.

[ryankittleson]

I like using morph targets for all facial movement except for a jaw bone. using bones to pull the face mesh can work better than morph targets with cartoony characters. more realistic facial animation will likely be better with mostly morph targets.

Read up on the Morpher modifier. it's actually pretty easy to animate once the brunt work of making morph targets is done.

[Ls3D]

Modifying a base mesh (or patch, etc) and using the morpher is a common and robust way of keyframing facial animation and lip sync. Rigging with bones is also a valid approach, but seems a bit tougher for most characters.

Do you have a phoneme refference chart? I bought a lip sync engine ($400 US) that creates the phoneme morph targets from .WAV and text files, I really dig this tool and have used it 4 times in production.

I bet you can still find the phoneme refference on thier site even if you choose to not to purchase the product.

http://www.lipsinc.com/

-Shea
www.Ls3D.com

[Seven]

Thanx v much for the replys you three. Very helpful. I think i will use a combination of bones and morph after all.

And i will use the morph modifier :)

I will post my results when I have something I am happy with, may take a while because ive never done this before but im going to stick with it.

Sev

[windarr]

Originally posted by Iain McFadzen
If you plan on animating with Character Studio it wold probably be best to use straight morphs, since Skin doesn't work all that well with Biped and having both Skin and Physique in the same stack is just asking for instability problems.

What do you mean Iain? Why would you use Skin for bones. You can link bones to a biped and Physique will include them. I think that there is a little difficulty with it, but it can be worked out. I've done it before, and I recall that the bones didn't follow the biped at first, but after doing something....I don't recall at the moment what, it worked. So he should be able to do both, even if he uses CS.

[bschulte]

Another option for using morpher:

1. Model your target shapes to be the extremes of individual facial muscles, not phonemes.
2. Add these extremes to morpher.
3. Now use the morpher spinners to "build" your basic mouth (phoneme) positions.
4. For each position, add it to morpher using the "Capture current state" button.

Now when you animate, you can add nice subtle (and not so sublte) differences to your facial targets much more easily.

Cheers,
baaron

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