After seeing the insanely cool facial rig in this thread I decided to see if I could do something similar in AM. Now I don’t think you can do the UI that he had, but it was fairly easy to do something similar in a few minutes with just a null and some poses. Check it out here . Grab the null and slide it around and up and watch the mouth move.
If anyone has any ideas to improve upon it or problems they see with it, feel free to mess with it and repost.
BTW, this as done in v10.5 beta 12
:applause: thats really cool & inspiring
this technique could simplify facial animation alot, thx for sharin 
Woops, I totally forgot to explain how I went about setting this up.
Once the mouth poses were done I added the null and constrained the translation of the null to a 10x10 square using the “Translate Limit” constraint. Then I opened up properties on the null, right clicked on Translate and chose “New Relationship.” I went through and moved the null to different positions in the square. For example, -5x 0y 0z has Right Pull set at 100%.
-5x 5y 0z is Right Pull 100%, and so on with each corner and side representing one of the poses at 100%. What’s cool is you could probably take this further and work in the z direction as well. Then when you manipulate the null you could use the 1,2,3 keys to constrain them one or more axes.
Big thanks to Syeko for his demo reel and showing how cool a setup like this can be. There are endless possibilities.
thx (: already found that “transform relationship”
never knew something like that was possible :buttrock:
a cube-like-limit would be totally enough
for the whole facial setup for most toon-chars,
eight faces & in each corner one & all the interactions in between
but one could of coz also do it 2d with an octagon
instead of a square or even a circle (:
thx again for sharin
did also some tests
2 nulls with rotate- & translate-pose-controlling
there’s just too many possibillities :buttrock:
Couldn’t you just make your own UI? I think that’s what the original guy did (he said it was made from curves) - just draw your squares, letters, etc. with splines. Then setup your nulls as you had already done within areas of the makeshift interface. You could constrain that object (along with your controller nulls) to the camera, so it is always perpendicular to your view. Would be interesting to give it a go.
Good luck.
I have been doing a similar thing with smartskin bones. For the eyebrows make some poses like up/down puppydog/frown etc. Then make a bone that sticks out from the eyebrow area. Set it to rotate only then make a smartskin for it. Move the bone to an extreeme position then set the pose sliders to how you want. Then go to another position. Carry on with this untill you are happy.
Having the a control null constrained to a spline path would be a grat idea for some things I suspect. It might be possible to use it to animate a smile that moves round an oddly-shaped jaw. I am off to play…
Originally posted by Finkster
[B]Couldn’t you just make your own UI? I think that’s what the original guy did (he said it was made from curves) - just draw your squares, letters, etc. with splines. Then setup your nulls as you had already done within areas of the makeshift interface. You could constrain that object (along with your controller nulls) to the camera, so it is always perpendicular to your view. Would be interesting to give it a go.Good luck. [/B]
Yes you could. In fact with the Maya MEL script I am writting, this is how I am doing it. I am creating NURBS curves (so they don’t render) on the fly, and then hooking everything up automagically.
If Hash would impliment a FULL BLOWN scripting engine, along the lines of MEL, you could write custom tools with ease, and it would really open up the applications power.
Originally posted by Finkster
[B]Couldn’t you just make your own UI? I think that’s what the original guy did (he said it was made from curves) - just draw your squares, letters, etc. with splines. Then setup your nulls as you had already done within areas of the makeshift interface. You could constrain that object (along with your controller nulls) to the camera, so it is always perpendicular to your view. Would be interesting to give it a go.Good luck. [/B]
Yeah, that’s what I’ve been doing now. Pretty cool stuff and I’m amazed more people hadn’t thought of it before. Someyimes it’s easy to get complacent and not think outside the box.
Originally posted by mhovland
[B]Yes you could. In fact with the Maya MEL script I am writting, this is how I am doing it. I am creating NURBS curves (so they don’t render) on the fly, and then hooking everything up automagically.If Hash would impliment a FULL BLOWN scripting engine, along the lines of MEL, you could write custom tools with ease, and it would really open up the applications power. [/B]
I think they are pretty locked down as far as feature in this rev, but it’s definitely something we should suggest for AM v11.
Look forward to seeing your Maya MEL script Mike!
I thought someone had added python support?
I rememebr back in 9 someone posting python scripts. Some were arrays or new primitives?
Jason
I haven’t tried the Python scripting plug-in, but it’s located here:
http://www.sorfa.com/plugins/am_pythonscript.html
It was last updated on 8/19/2001…since things have changed some with version 10, it might not work past version 9.
Doh! I just found it again here:
http://www.sorfa.com/plugins/script/downloads.html
This one was last updated 6/19/2002. It appears to be Windows only (not sure, but it says you need it) and at least AM 9.5j. Still, I don’t know about version 10.
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