[3Ds Max] When's best to create morph targets for facial movement?
Hi guys,
Does it matter when the morph targets for facial expressions are created? I have a character and was going to rig and skin it and then do the targets later on. Or should the targets be created before skinning?
Thanks.
Does it matter when the morph targets for facial expressions are created? I have a character and was going to rig and skin it and then do the targets later on. Or should the targets be created before skinning?
Thanks.
Replies
Is there a reason why you are using morph targets? I haven't seen anybody use that method over the traditional animate a facial rig setup. Unless they have software that automatically creates phoenems from the morph targets.
http://www.chrisevans3d.com/pub_blog/?p=31
its cheap and quick
It's been a while since i used morph targets. But i think you can do it after the skinning. As long the vert count doesn't change.
That would be because of ancient console hardware that the industry has been forced to use for far too long and places just doing facial animation the same old way and not wanting to change, don't know how or think that throwing more bones and more points to animate will make things all better.
Bones are typically cheaper (tech wise) than vertex animation but there is a point that they start to really slow things down, not just tech wise but the more points you add the more animators have to interact with and the slower they go. Bones also are a lot harder to set up the more bones you have the more difficult it is to skin and it takes more time vs just sculpting the morphers you need. With tools like transmographier mirroring morphs is easy to do, so you only really need to do half of your morphs. Sure other tools mirror morph targets but not as eaisly or as flexible as trasmog, plus you can pump in an asymetry moprph.
Most animators prefer morph targets as the main base for the rig over bones and those that say they prefer bones probably haven't used morph targets that much and prefer bones because that's what they know.
Morph based rigs get used a lot in film especially in animated features that typically have amazing facial animation that the gaming industry can't possibly pull off with bones alone. With any luck that level of control is where our industry is headed. It's also easier to do cleaner more predicable facial motion capture quickly with a FACS based on morphs. Bones aren't completely banished from the face, there are a lot of blended rigs out there. I know some studios prefer to use morphs to animate and then use locators on the face to drive bones for the final output, so what they interact with is morphs but what gets spit out is bone animation.
Doing morphs also allows you to "sculpt in wrinkles" for specific shapes and bake those into normal maps to be used as wrinkle maps. So when a specific target turns on, so does it's wrinkle map. You can do this with bones but you are relying on a lot of bones to hit specific conditions to blend the wrinkle map and its easier to get that wrong than it is for a 1 morph target to 1 wrinkle map ratio. All of those checks for all of those bones can really slow a rig down, or lead to wrinkles always blending just a bit and slowing things down.
The solution I prefer actually uses both bones and morphs. Morphs are the main rig driving a hidden mesh, bones ride a long driving the final mesh and because of this you can animate quickly with morphs and do custom tweaks with the bones but you aren't locked into manipulating all of those points to get what you need, just tweaking it when you want to.
With the new hardware coming out and the lines between film and games blurring even more, you'll see more and more places stepping up to the plate and doing morph rigs.
Good bye flappy mouth animation...