image maps for facial animation questions

#1

Hello,
I’m interested in making a character that uses image maps for eyes/mouth (think Pocoyo).
I’m wondering if anyone knows of any tutorials (paid or otherwise) that have a good simple (emphasis on simple!) example of setting up a facial animation rig for a character like this.

It seems that XSI has the tools to do this using Warp FCurve in an image clip. I guess what I’m looking for is how a smarter XSI user than I (most users!) might go about this to aid in a better workflow (maybe using synoptic views so an animator could choose from different mouth/eye shapes and key facial expressions?).

Thanks for your thoughts,

mm

#2

This is really easy to do with the “texture layer editor”.
You can link the weight sliders with your own custom panel for better control.

#3

You know, I had never really used the texture layer editor (as it just seemed to be another layer of abstraction to the render tree) but it is nice that when you add a layer, it automatically adds a diffuse and ambient property and sets them to 1. It’s a bit fiddly to add all that in the render tree, so I can see using the layer editor quite a bit now since I do a lot of texturing with layers.

Using the weight hadn’t really occured to me at all. I’ve set up a quick little parameter set and have some controls in the viewport using DisplayInfo. Pretty neat.

I guess the next step up from this would be to do a script-based parameter set.
What would be nice is if selecting one parameter would toggle on the image (set a key with a “1” value) while toggling OFF the other images in the set (setting a weight key at “0”. I’ve never done any real scripting of any kind so this might be beyond me.

Thanks for your help Manny. Your dvd looks really good… I would have already gotten it if my snail mail wasn’t so spotty and I wasn’t travelling so much.
Any chance of offering a downloadable version? (I guess it’s the server cost of hosting that much data for download that would make it difficult?)

mm

#4

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