I'm working with blender, and I've gotten far enough that I'm happy with everything on my head, but, the shape keys! I am having so much trouble morphing the face, specifically the mouth! I cannot get the mouth to open. The eyes are doable but incredibly tedious. Does anyone have pointers on making this process slightly easier, especially for mouths?
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3 months ago
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Posted by “jazzKat” on July 21, 2024.
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To add to what the others have already said, and knowing you've already 'solved' this, the big issue with shapekeys isn't really the shapekeys themselves or even custom heads, it's trying to match a custom head to the defaults. The best approach for fully custom heads it to add 'keys' that match your head, and then animate based on that. With that said, Heads are probably *THE* most complicated product to make so GG on doing one!
Oh also, yes, shapekey are VERY tedious because you have to physically *SHAPE* the head to create the 'key' for that 'pose', and if you go full IMVU level of keys, that's A LOT of editing!
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3 months ago
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Posted by “Nums” on July 19, 2024.
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Sounds about right. I made facial pose expressions for a head I worked on.
And it has quite a few morph targets playing on the face. A lot of mouth expressions can be made using various percentages of morphs combined on the same frame. To really fine it you have to play with blending multiple together.
This one has 10 morphs playing. 6 of which are mouth morphs all blending together on 1 frame.
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3 months ago
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Posted by “Drosselmeyer” on July 17, 2024.
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Yeah. Morph targets are tricky :D
I am currently working on getting morph targets to export from 3ds Max and will add this support to the 3ds Max Toolkit. Blender already supports it to a degree (I am not 100% on the amount of support because I did not work on that tool).
In my mind an ideal solution would be:
Make your mesh that you want to make morph targets for
Rig it such that you can get all of the intended targets by manipulating the rig
Animate it
Run a tool to make morph targets with options
at keyframes
# of morph targets to generate between a start and end time.
Export
I could see this working for heads as well, but the tricky thing would be keeping track of which facial expression is associated with each keyframe. But I am sure this could be solved by some kind of tool UI.
There are actually two parts to the head facial expression:
The morph target meshes (This is what I believe the Blender Studio Toolkit Head Tool helps with, but just to create copies of a head mesh and name the copies correctly. You still need to modify each target which is the bulk of the work)
The percentage that a each expression is set to (This is what the Morph section of the Blender Studio Toolkit Animation Tool does). If I remember correctly you can export the morph percentages to create "custom" expression for IMVU, but they are all using existing product morph targets. So for example you could make a smile that also have the eyes popping out ... I think :P
This was actually good for me to brainstorm on.
Thanks!
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3 months ago
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Posted by “Pantalooners” on July 16, 2024.
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I am! I was mostly having issues with the morph target meshes, I ended up figuring it out, not sure if in the best way, but enough to make do anyhow haha. Afaik the morph targets can't be moved by rig, only edit mode and sculpt, which made the process fairly tedious haha. Unless i'm missing something
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3 months ago
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Posted by “Drosselmeyer” on July 16, 2024.
[Archived]
Hi @Pantalooners, Are you using the in IMVU Studio Toolkit? It has a Heads Tool which get you as far as creating all of the necessary morph targets and naming them correctly, but it sounds like you are having trouble with making each of the expressions? I am guessing you have rigged the face with shape keys? Have you looked at how the Toolkit Animation Tool works on the default avatar head? I am not super familiar with working with shape keys, but @jazzKat might be able to help you out.
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Posted by “Pantalooners” on July 16, 2024.
[Archived]I'm working with blender, and I've gotten far enough that I'm happy with everything on my head, but, the shape keys! I am having so much trouble morphing the face, specifically the mouth! I cannot get the mouth to open. The eyes are doable but incredibly tedious. Does anyone have pointers on making this process slightly easier, especially for mouths?
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Community posted 3 months ago Admin
Posted by “jazzKat” on July 21, 2024.
[Archived]To add to what the others have already said, and knowing you've already 'solved' this, the big issue with shapekeys isn't really the shapekeys themselves or even custom heads, it's trying to match a custom head to the defaults. The best approach for fully custom heads it to add 'keys' that match your head, and then animate based on that. With that said, Heads are probably *THE* most complicated product to make so GG on doing one!
Oh also, yes, shapekey are VERY tedious because you have to physically *SHAPE* the head to create the 'key' for that 'pose', and if you go full IMVU level of keys, that's A LOT of editing!
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Community posted 3 months ago Admin
Posted by “Nums” on July 19, 2024.
[Archived]Sounds about right. I made facial pose expressions for a head I worked on.
https://www.imvu.com/shop/product.php?products_id=64699010
Then you wear a product like this, https://www.imvu.com/shop/product.php?products_id=64705913
And it has quite a few morph targets playing on the face. A lot of mouth expressions can be made using various percentages of morphs combined on the same frame. To really fine it you have to play with blending multiple together.
https://www.imvu.com/shop/product.php?products_id=64699513
This one has 10 morphs playing. 6 of which are mouth morphs all blending together on 1 frame.
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Community posted 3 months ago Admin
Posted by “Drosselmeyer” on July 17, 2024.
[Archived]Yeah. Morph targets are tricky :D
I am currently working on getting morph targets to export from 3ds Max and will add this support to the 3ds Max Toolkit. Blender already supports it to a degree (I am not 100% on the amount of support because I did not work on that tool).
In my mind an ideal solution would be:
I could see this working for heads as well, but the tricky thing would be keeping track of which facial expression is associated with each keyframe. But I am sure this could be solved by some kind of tool UI.
There are actually two parts to the head facial expression:
This was actually good for me to brainstorm on.
Thanks!
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Community posted 3 months ago Admin
Posted by “Pantalooners” on July 16, 2024.
[Archived]I am! I was mostly having issues with the morph target meshes, I ended up figuring it out, not sure if in the best way, but enough to make do anyhow haha. Afaik the morph targets can't be moved by rig, only edit mode and sculpt, which made the process fairly tedious haha. Unless i'm missing something
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Community posted 3 months ago Admin
Posted by “Drosselmeyer” on July 16, 2024.
[Archived]Hi @Pantalooners, Are you using the in IMVU Studio Toolkit? It has a Heads Tool which get you as far as creating all of the necessary morph targets and naming them correctly, but it sounds like you are having trouble with making each of the expressions? I am guessing you have rigged the face with shape keys? Have you looked at how the Toolkit Animation Tool works on the default avatar head? I am not super familiar with working with shape keys, but @jazzKat might be able to help you out.
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