... is modeling this guy, a caricatured version of... guess who? And setting him up for facial animation. I just got the most amazing morphing tool possible :D from Daniel Pook-Kolb, it's called BCS (blendshapes combination system), allowing combination-sculpting of morph shapes. Combination-sculpting is a technique developed by Bay Raitt for Gollum, in the LOTR; Daniel mentions he had the same idea in parallel, without knowing about Bay's work, but he was fully convinced of the power of this technique only after seeing Gollum. His Maya plugin gives Maya users this fantastic possibility of using a tool otherwise well kept under locks by the big studios, such as Weta. It's light years away from Maya's default blendshapes toolset and I'm sooooo happy Daniel wrote it.
What it does, basically, among many many things (like painting "deltas" and automating morphs tapering, automating inbetweens with all sorts of nice interpolations and keeping dataPoints in memory, readily available for tweaking at any time, so you don't have to keep 900+ geometrical objects in your scene :D ...) well, it, mostly, firstly... allows you to create the craziest and most expressive and flexible morphs you can sculpt (!), without worrying about the good mix. If they don't mix well, no problemo: you make a corrective morph. And another one. And another one... The bulk of sculpting remains with the main shapes though, which you only sculpt half, for the left or right, and then mirror; the corrections are easy, and made even simpler by the deform paint (I like to think of it as 'paint deltas' - sound more like rocket science) tool.
BCS made me reconsider blendshapes for facial animation - I never liked the rigidity of morph animation on the face. But this is an entirely new realm of craziness!!! I'm also thinking about adding some extra-functionality to the face-rig on top of the morphs, such as a cluster or a joint that freely rotates/translates the mouth around, with a falloff covering more or less the entire face. Maybe some squash and stretch, in a similar manner, parallel to the rest. We shall see...
I also read part of Paul Ekman's FACS and skimmed through the whole thing. I need to go deeper into it, in time; it's an incredible manual. Wow! I'm supercharged with information right now, can't wait to start building those AU (facial Action Units) shapes for monsieur Cousteau.
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About me
I'm a character animator, visual artist, game dev, and music composer. I like to doodle, write, experiment, and plan my next big thing. I love tech that inspires and enables art. I have a formal background in music composition. And I like to walk around the world and see things up close. Archives
September 2021
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