LightWave 3D 8 Character Animation phần 10 pdf

440 Chapter 19: Facial Animation Figure 19.38. oo (boot). Figure 19.39. P (Peas, Beans). 441 Chapter 19: Facial Animation Figure 19.40. r (Right). Figure 19.41. S (Sun, Zoo). 442 Chapter 19: Facial Animation Figure 19.42. T (Tip, Did, Nice). Figure 19.43. th (this). As you can see, we’re not concerned with the sound of each phoneme, but rather the shape of our mouths as we make the sounds. You’ll notice there is no shape in the above list for the “H” sound in the word “Hat.” This is because we can use percentages of the shapes A, ah, E,oreh to provide any number of visual interpre - tations of that sound. 19.7 “Plussing” Morphs What happens when you’re watching your facial performance and you say to yourself, “Gee, things look good, but everything is just a bit too subdued”? Are you stuck with having to re-model a morph target in LightWave if you want to boost or reduce its intensity? Heck no! You can use Apply Morph to apply a morph to itself, fiddling with the Strength percentages (positive or negative) until you get the “volume level” you’re looking for. 443 Chapter 19: Facial Animation Important Note: Remember that animation isn’t about recreating how it looks to do something, it is giving a visual impression of how it feels to do something. This holds equally true for character and facial ani - mation alike. Figure 19.44. In the center is the base morph for the th phoneme. On the left is the result of applying the morph to itself with a strength of –30%, effectively reducing its intensity by 30%. On the right is the result of applying the morph to itself with a strength of 100%, effectively doubling its influence on the model. 19.8 Morph Mixer So, how do you put all this facial sculpting and splitting to work and get a character to speak? Through the magical manipulations made manifest through Morph Mixer. 444 Chapter 19: Facial Animation Figure 19.45. Scenes\CharacterSetups\MrCool_Facial_Setup has (the Morph Mixer version of) Mr. Cool all set up and ready to go on the ThinGuy rigging we’ve been using. 445 Chapter 19: Facial Animation Figure 19.46. With Mr. Cool selected, I open an Object Properties window and, from the Deform tab, Add Displacement|Morph Mixer. 446 Chapter 19: Facial Animation Figure 19.47. Double-clicking on the plug-in’s name in the displacement list opens the Morph Mixer window. (You can also open a plug-in’s window by selecting it and then choosing Edit|Properties.) 447 Chapter 19: Facial Animation Figure 19.48. The Morph Mixer window itself. You expand and collapse your groups of morphs by clicking on the little triangles to the left of each group name. The cur- rently selected group has its morphs displayed in the “action area,” where you see sliders you can quickly move between –100% and +100%. In the Readout/Input box you can see the value of the slider and enter values by hand. When you have more morphs than the window can display, a scroll bar appears in the upper-right corner of the window. You can edit the envelope for any morph by clicking on the “E” but - ton to its right. And using the left and right triangles, you can quickly jump to the next and previous keyframes for that morph. The Keyframe indicator shows when your current frame holds a key for a morph. 448 Chapter 19: Facial Animation Note: Morph Mixer has some helpful keyboard/mouse combinations for working with keyframes within a group of morphs that I use frequently: 4 Clicking on a keyframe indicator that shows that there is no key on the current frame for that morph will create a key on the current frame with the current value for that morph. 4 Clicking on a keyframe indicator that shows that there is a key on the current frame for that morph will remove the key on the current frame for that morph. 4 Shift-clicking on a keyframe indicator that shows that there is no key on the current frame for that morph will create keys for all morphs at their current value on that frame. 4 Shift-clicking on a keyframe indicator that shows that there is a key on the current frame for that morph will remove keys on the current frame for all morphs. 4 Ctrl-clicking on a keyframe indicator will set a key on the current frame for that morph with the value of 0%, regardless of whether or not there already is a key on that frame. 4 Shift-Ctrl-clicking on a keyframe indicator will set keyframes at 0% on the current frame for all morphs. 449 Chapter 19: Facial Animation Figure 19.49. After you get the hang of understanding how each morph affects the face and how they interact with each other, it’s just a matter of applying the same knowledge of silhouette, anticipation, timing, and all the other principles of anima- tion you’ve already learned to this new set of controls. [...]... Note: Surfacing is something beyond the scope of this book on animation, but if you’d like to add that skill to your growing list, Essential LightWave 3D 8 (1-55622- 082 -0) covers surfacing in great detail (The book is designed to give you the same level of LightWave aptitude that I had after working on Babylon 5.) 450 Chapter 19: Facial Animation 19.9 Sample Workflow The first thing you need to do... mirror and your character on the screen without moving your head Watch what your own face does as you deliver the lines convincingly and recreate that performance for the character After you get used to the controls, you’ll see that doing facial animation in this manner isn’t difficult, it’s just moderately timeconsuming I find that if it takes me x amount of time to do the animation of the character s... animate facial animation directly in LightWave? What’s the big idea? Remember a while back when I said that you must first sell your performance with your character s physical animation? That wasn’t just lip service That’s the way we did things on Dinosaur, and the way all the top studios get the best overall performances to tell their stories If you can convince an audience of the character s emotional... studios, programs designed to be used in traditional animation, and old Amiga animation programs make use of this time-proven, intelligent way of laying out animation information On the leftmost track, you see a waveform representation of your loaded audio track (which you choose from under the File menu) Facial Animation defaults the length of your animation to the length of your audio clip, with respect... guessed it — you choose how Facial Animation handles these morphs under the Options menu.) 473 Chapter 20: Timothy Albee’s Facial Animation 20.5 Integration with LightWave After you’ve laid in your dialogue shapes, honed them with perhaps a second or third dialogue track, and recorded your puppeteering tracks, Facial Animation gives you two ways of interfacing its data with LightWave If you don’t ask FA... better facial animation than this blending of traditional animation, CGI animation, and puppeteering In short, Facial Animation is what I always wished existed — and now it does And rather than it being a proprietary tool of a huge mega-studio, it is something you have access to bringing into your own productions! 474 Chapter 21 In Conclusion So how do you feel? You’ve learned how to set up a character. .. well 455 Chapter 19: Facial Animation 19 .10 Recycling One of the greatest things about the way LightWave stores its endomorphs “inside” the model itself as deviations from a base pose is that if you use a finished head as a base from which to sculpt another head, the new head will retain all the morph targets of the first! Figure 19.55 In doing Kaze, Ghost Warrior, the first character I did was Itsua,... and motivations without facial animation, then what you do with a facial performance will crank up the intensity and believability of that performance tenfold So, two separate programs help to make it absolutely positively clear: When your character s physical performance sells the shot, then you move on to adding facial animation 461 Chapter 20: Timothy Albee’s Facial Animation 20.3 FA’s Interface... let you choose to set your visibility from LightWave s surface names, parts, or sketch color 464 Chapter 20: Timothy Albee’s Facial Animation Note: You should plan on having your model on the first layer for Facial Animation, but if you absolutely, positively must have your model on some other layer, you can specify which layer(s) FA should use for saving animation and which it should show under the... (saving him as a new model first) started dragging his points around until I had a new character And because this new character s morph data was based on the distance each vertex was from its “base” position, nearly all of the morphs created for Itsua were fine for this new character as well! 456 Chapter 19: Facial Animation Figure 19.56 Kaze was created from pulling points on Itsua’s head model And . skill to your growing list, Essential LightWave 3D 8 (1-55622- 082 -0) covers surfacing in great detail. (The book is designed to give you the same level of LightWave aptitude that I had after working. 19: Facial Animation Figure 19. 38. oo (boot). Figure 19.39. P (Peas, Beans). 441 Chapter 19: Facial Animation Figure 19.40. r (Right). Figure 19.41. S (Sun, Zoo). 442 Chapter 19: Facial Animation Figure. itself with a strength of 100 %, effectively doubling its influence on the model. 19 .8 Morph Mixer So, how do you put all this facial sculpting and splitting to work and get a character to speak? Through