symmetrical/asymmetrical facial keys in Max

Archanex

Hey guys,

I was looking through Jason Osipas book again, and there's a part where he talks about deriving asymmetrical shapes out of symmetrical ones, and it got me thinking. Why not build symmetrical ones from asymmetrical ones? That way you'd only have to move verts on one side of the face for the bulk of the work.

My question is, what techniques do you guys use for creating symmetrical/asymmetrical morph targets. I know there are several ways to do this, but I wanted to hear what has work best for you all. Thanks

SkullboX

I have few experience with lipsync, twice in max and once in maya.

In Max I got my hands on a very easy to use script. I don't have it anymore, but I doubt it's hard to track down. You simply pose one side of the face and hit the mirror button and it would create a mirrored version.

I've been told maya out of the box has a similar feature and you'd expect there would at least be scripts who can handle this, but I couldn't find any. Instead I just mirrored a duplicate of my morph and vert-snapped another copy that was in the same position. While this can be frustrating if you have a complicated morph, a detailed control mesh, or both, but it worked very well for me, though I'd rather just hit a single button.

In any case, I wouldn't want to animate without seperate morphs/blendshapes for both sides, at least for the emotions. For speech-related morphs, I just created symmetrical mouth shapes since it's a lot less work to animate as I was on a tight deadline.

Eric Chadwick

There are many versions of that script, not sure which is best though...
http://www.scriptspot.com/start.asp?p=ma...orph&Page=1

fogmann

The mirroring script for Maya is called abSymMesh, it comes with Art of Rigging Vol.1 book, and is really useful. Can be also found at HighEnd3D: http://www.highend3d.com/maya/downloads/mel_scripts/modeling/poly_tools/abSymMesh-2830.html