Next Gen Character Development in Regards to Animation and Motion Capture.

littleclaude

Hello

Any tips for next gen Character Development in regards to animation and motion capture.

For example I notice in films these days there is a lot of animated displacement/morph to help push the muscles on rigs. In its simplest use it’s used for foot placement by bulging out the feet to compensate the weight in order to help ground the characters.

The characters in John Carter of Mars was a good example.

Without Displacement


With Displacement


It seams that in many of the key poses they export to Zbrush to displace/morph the mesh to give it that extra zing as there is only so much a rig can do. I could see this being useful for a main character or Boss.






[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSJIWoqDWRc"]Woola Break Down - YouTube[/ame]

Timidy

Interesting topic,

There is "LipService w/Lbrush" by Joe Alter for Max and Maya. It allows you to sculpt extra details over your model while animating to get thinks like wrinkles under the chin when character opens mouth wide and muscle definition.

Here's a demo of LipService (Maya plugin version i think)

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuiB1Rv75O8"]CGI Deformation Test HD: "Lbrush" by Joe Alter[/ame]


For practical geometry for game characters, since we can't have all those polys, you can use topology that creates muscle definition and just create morph targets. Most game engines can't use morphs from what I hear but Unity has a plugin to allow morph target usage.

I'm working on a character who I've given a little bit of muscle tone and my topology, though not perfect, is able to allow me to bring out some muscle definition. Rigging a character skeleton with muscle tone morphs can provide some nice results.

Some examples of what I'm doing;





Shoulder/neck....


Let me know if you want to see a wireframe

pior

[Edit]
Wooops, I misread the above post. Please ignore my post

littleclaude

Timidy wrote: »

Interesting topic,

Let me know if you want to see a wireframe

Fantastic project, would love to see it an engine and Yes please, would love to see the wire frame.

will your muscles be driven from set driven keys? I would love to test it out on some motion capture or even with very subtle animation like leaning forwards and backwards or slowly walking up some stairs.

Timidy

littleclaude wrote: »

Fantastic project, would love to see it an engine and Yes please, would love to see the wire frame.

will your muscles be driven from set driven keys? I would love to test it out on some motion capture or even with very subtle animation like leaning forwards and backwards or slowly walking up some stairs.

Hi, thanks! Yea I'll be using the 3DS Max method of set driven keys which is wire parameters and something called Reaction Manager that you can rig up to drive morphs and stuff. It's fairly simple to get grasp of. I created individual controls for each muscle.

You can make it where when the arm goes up for instance, the muscle that connects the shoulder and chest (forgot its name oops!) activates and flexes automatically by driving the morph target with the arm control. Then you can create a separate control for enhancement or if you need to flex the muscle without animating the arm, for example. I've even created a "belly rolls/wrinkles" morph target for when the torso bends, like in reality. The only issue is lack of edges if you're wanting to be frugal with poly count.

A game engine would be nice. I haven't learned any developing yet, except a light bit of Unity scripting with the help of an ebook. But I do plan to learn. I'd definitely like to have this character in a game engine and see how looks with the morphs, if possible. I think it's high time more games included morphs for better animation

I have some wire frames for you. Geometry gets a little messy trying to do this but I managed to keep it mostly quad-ified. I want to get better with each muscular character I build. Next will be a male character so I'll get to really bulge the muscles on that one

jfeez

Using morphs/blend shapes is one way to do this. Another is to use blended normal maps (maybe even displacement in the not so distant future) You can also use a joint based system that fakes muscle mass, which is pretty common atm in studios, you can drive these with sdks or with expressions/nodes. with your project Timidy i would set up the morphs so they automatically work depending on rotation and then allow the animator to offset them slightly. The main problem with using morphs tho is how expensive they can be, while keeping everything on joints is basically free since it is baked down on export I prototyped this a few months ago and should demonstrate what i mean about using joints

Timidy

jfeez wrote: »

Using morphs/blend shapes is one way to do this. Another is to use blended normal maps (maybe even displacement in the not so distant future) You can also use a joint based system that fakes muscle mass, which is pretty common atm in studios, you can drive these with sdks or with expressions/nodes. with your project Timidy i would set up the morphs so they automatically work depending on rotation and then allow the animator to offset them slightly. The main problem with using morphs tho is how expensive they can be, while keeping everything on joints is basically free since it is baked down on export I prototyped this a few months ago and should demonstrate what i mean about using joints

Hey jfeez thanks for the reply I was hoping for input from another rigger.

In Tomb Raider Underworld, you can see wrinkles on Lara's forehead when she lift her brow. In The Last of Us for example I'm thinking it's actual geometry from what I've seen in Naughty Dog's character rig demos. But in TRU I'm thinking it's what you mentioned - blended normals. I've wondered about how it's done, if you have some info please share. I'll Google it as well.

The joint method is awesome. I want to know how that's done. In the example,is the rotation what's driving the muscle joint? Also, the muscle volume mesh - is it skinned to the joint that is driven by the rotation? That's a very cool method, nice to see studios doing something like this for game characters.

jfeez

The method i used was to create a nurbs plane that has 3 cluster groups, 2 are at the muscles connection points the other is in the center. The connection clusters are parents to the joints that will affect the muscle. I made a distance tool and parents the locators to the connection clusters. The using the node editor i made the center cluster group move up depending on the value of the distance node. The joint you see in the center is point on surface constrained to the nurbs plane. Atm this method works well but im prototyping a few other ways for more complex bulging.

For the wrinkle maps, ive never actually set one up (i will be soon tho \o/) so im not sure how to do it but i imagine you can hook up a normal map shader parameter to a rotation or whatever would cause the wrinkle and it should work. Im not sure how the shader stuff works yet tho For things like the last of us and tomb raider its will mostly be really good skinning and joint placement mixed with corrective blend shapes and wrinkle maps. Watch the last of us rigging demo on youtube if you haven't already, so much good info in it.

Timidy

Yeah I checked out that Last of Us rigging demo. It's a great and informative vid indeed. They've set the bar pretty high for realistic character animation with that game.