Wrinklemaps in 3D Studio Max
Hi all, my name is Eric and I am a alcoholic...
...nah, I have a issue, but it's of the 3DSmax kind
I am doing my first major animation, and in major, I meen: Huge environments, fully rigged (although optimized and normal mapped from HD ones) characters, sound, voice actors, the whole 9 yards.
The problem is, to make my characters more believable, I want to add wrinkle maps like in Crysis, Uncharted DF, TR Underworld etc. But I dn't know how to do it in max.
I have an idea on the creation of them, but not on how I'd make the characters use them when the face goes into a range that has to be wrinkled, i.e:
How can I add them to my characters, so that they work automatically?
Please people, I need help in this... and with the alcoohol, joke.
Thanks in advance
- Eric
...nah, I have a issue, but it's of the 3DSmax kind
I am doing my first major animation, and in major, I meen: Huge environments, fully rigged (although optimized and normal mapped from HD ones) characters, sound, voice actors, the whole 9 yards.
The problem is, to make my characters more believable, I want to add wrinkle maps like in Crysis, Uncharted DF, TR Underworld etc. But I dn't know how to do it in max.
I have an idea on the creation of them, but not on how I'd make the characters use them when the face goes into a range that has to be wrinkled, i.e:
How can I add them to my characters, so that they work automatically?
Please people, I need help in this... and with the alcoohol, joke.
Thanks in advance
- Eric
Replies
You need an engine that supports them, crysis is the only one i know available to use freely.
Thanx a bunch man!
So they come forth mainly in gaming engines, I take it they are script based/controlled?
If so, is there no way to recreate that in Max? I have max 2009 32bit, and I render using mental ray (testing the finalRender renderer now, and I like).
Is there a way to let the renderer know when to make the wrinkles/additional normals visible?/to cue them?
I suppose you could fake it in max using morphs, then animating the opacity of the wrinklemap as you move the morph slider.
http://www.cgtantra.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=203&Itemid=33
You use a composite map in the bump slot.
You plug in your base bump map at the bottom, plugging in each wrinkle bump on the left and the mask for that bump on the right. If you have one wrinkle map you need a layer and a mask for each area you want to control.
You can then animate the opacity of each map to blend the different areas.
You can use reaction manager or wire parameters to hook the opacity setting up to an object like a control board.
This tutorial covers creating a control board from splines.
http://www.3dtotal.com/team/Tutorials/face_rig/face_rig.php
Walter Osborn script in that tutorial is pretty great at making a control board piece quickly. Careful tho the center circle's local Y axis is up instead of the default Z.
This tutorial will cover the same process only manually if you're interested in knowing what the script is actually doing (and want to align the center circle's up axis to Z like the rest of Max)
http://www.viefex.com/view_tutorial.php?viewkey=066b82ab86dff8a46af6&page=1&viewtype=&category=3
If the opacity parameter doesn't show up as something you can wire or react with then you need to animate one key with it for it to show up in the list. Easiest way is to turn on auto key and toggle each opacity up and down once.
Uncharted 1 and 2 both use these. Watch as drake runs and his shirt and pants move as they might.
also, unreal engine 3 supports animated normalmaps/wrinkle maps with FaceFX, this was in early 2005 so pretty sure theyv pimped it up even more now.
That example is also for B/W bumps which for us are slightly less costly than full blown normal maps (I blame our users hardware).
You can use normal maps just the same I haven't tested it much. You might need to get tricky and disable the blue channel (in the additional wrinkle maps not the base) and set the layer mode to overlay for it to blend with the base correctly. Like you would if you combined two normal maps in photoshop.
As for the blanket example its hard to say. If there are physics on the blanket its hard to predict how it will react making it hard to create a wrinkle map that would work. You normally want tightly controlled areas where you'll know exactly what kind of wrinkles will be produced. Like wrinkles in faces, around elbows and knees.
On behalf of the entire crew on this side, I would like to thank all of you who helped out in this thread,
In a big part, major thanks to Vig, I got it working and it made our characters more believable.
I hope your site gets up and going soon.
(That's from one of the guys
Good luck with your projects all, and Merry Christmas/Hanuka and a Happy New Year!
I managed to create the controllers through reaction manager, which means that it is possible to create some fancy controls for the morph targets.
Using this same technique described above using wire parameters, I have been trying to connect a wire parameter to the opacity of the composite material used in the bump material slot.
Unfortunately I can't find the opacity parameter in the wire parameter manager. The alternative so far have therefore been to keyframe the opacity, even though the most precise and fast method would be to have the opacity linked to the individual controls that controls that morph targets.
My question is: Could you provide a short tutorial/explanation as to how this is done? - In return I would be very grateful.
Yup!
That did the trick!
Thank you so much Mark!