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Tutorial: Bicho’s facial animation system (january 2003)
Here’s the full description of Bicho’s facial system. A lot of
people asked me about it and I always say that it’s nothing complex.
You’ll find that it’s a very easy but powerful system. It’s based
in two techniques:
basic morphing and
global deformers’s morphing. The
main idea for Bicho was to build a character with a enormous facial
expression, with a lot of elasticity, but you can use this system for
every character you want, specially cartoon characters.
Head pieces
Bicho’s face is compound by the head, the two eyes and two eyelids over the eyes, all of them separated objects, so the blinking of the character is done by rotating each eyelid.
Basic morphing
The
first step is making the basic Bicho’s gestures with the standard
morphing. There are only four morphing targets as you can see in the
first picture: angry eyes, smile, open mouth and squash mouth. Some of
this morph targets can be used in negative values so that you can create
the opposite gesture: |
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This means that we have a total amount of 7 basic gestures. As you can see they don’t have a special appeal and they don’t get the objective of elasticity that I was looking for. So this take us to the second step: the setup of a global deformer to enphasize the eyes gestures. If you see Bicho’s movie you can check that all the power of Bicho’s facial expression is in his eyes.
Global deformer's morphing
Bicho have a global deformer (Max FFD or Maya Lattice) for all the objects in the upper side of the head (eyes, eyelids and head, a total of 5 objects). This deformer affects all of these objects. The purpose of this element is to affect the volume of this area. |
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To get it we are going to make morphing of this deformer. The next step is to make the morph targets. There are only four: angry, pity, squash and right eye enlarge/left eye smaller.
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You can also use the negative values of this targets to get the opposite effect, the same that we did with the basic morph targets. As you can see this gestures are also a bit horrible by themselves, but remember that they're only made to enphasize the seven basic gestures .
Conclusion
So
that’s all. The only thing you have to do now to create your facial
animation is to mix the gestures provided by the two techniques. If you
try this system you’ll see that the only difficult is to decide what
are the gestures that you’re going to need and, obviusly, the result
that you want to obtain. We use to forget this last thing a lot of
times. Try to keep in your mind what you want to see when you finish
your work, and it will help you to avoid wrong steps in your character
creation, for example, creating lots of complex gestures that you
don’t really need because you can get them mixing basic gestures.
Check the animation books (I can recommend you “Cartoon animation”
by Preston Blair), they will help you to know what are the main facial
gestures used.
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Bicho facial animation system tutorial - january 2003 |