Talking Head (Animation)

[SillyBilly]

Here's a quick tester animation I put together of a new character model I'm working on - the texture isn't finished yet and the voice is nicked from Rainbow Six but just so you kids can get an idea... Our mods called Reinstatement - check it out at http://www.reinstatement-mod.co.uk - and you'll need DivX to view this wee .avi short!

DivX AVI:
http://www.reinstatement-mod.co.uk/best_of_the_best.avi

What'a 'ya fink? :cheers:

 

[waedoe]

lookin good

 

[The Dark Elf]

heh pretty cool, not bad

 

[gh0st]

he looks like a duck :\

 

[HatRabit]

its good. methinks his eyes are moving too much though, makes him look weird

 

[Mujuro]

Remember mate, Half-Life 2 allows puting a .WAV file and it syncs the mouth animation to the actual text, at least, I read this somewhere. Otherwise, looks good.

 

[ukfilmer]

yeah. uhm, the blinking was a tad quick, and deformed. eyes are too far open in general. and the mouth anim seemed to consist of opened and closed. not bad though

 

[SillyBilly]

LOL - twas just a quick test I put together, I didn't have any refrence footage which would explain his quick/ sudden movements. Thanks for the feedback anyway - plus that was interesting about HL2 syncing your audio files - Where did you hear about that..?

 

[Mujuro]

Interview with Gabe Newell, while back, not sure if it was canceled though.

 

[Cunbelin]

Facial animation is done using face poses, basically what will happen is there are a number of poses that you will have to make, a certain number of frames will be used to do this, so that on say frame 1 you make a neutral face, frame 2 you make a raised eyebrow, frame 3 will be the oo phoneme. If you check out the XSI video tutorials on HL2 they talk about it a bit there, I was able to talk to the guys doing the presentation at GDC, so if you have some more questions about the system the answer might be rattling about in my brain.

Basically just leave facial animation to the engine.

edt: heres where you should be able to get the videos: http://www.softimage.com/products/exp/hl2/default.asp?pg=learn/HL2_tutorials.htm

 

[mindless_moder]

i think that you are using some kind of bone system to do this animation ..i sugest u use morph targets and record urself (well lips mostly) saying the line and work of off that reference and build a number of morph targets .
the eye movement is wrong i think that the character saying the line would concentrate and direct the line toward the subject ...showing reasurance.

 

[Mikademius]

I don't know how many morphtargets you had here. Looked like four? Anyways, you need to morph the lips more. All the vowels need much deformation, just look in a mirror for reference. Considering this as a test I can't really say much about it. You need more morphtargets, that's for sure...