HDRI3D Supplement

I wrote an article which was published in conjunction with issue #7 of HDRI magazine. The article is available for free at the HDRI3D website. The article consists of 3 parts:
1) A review of the book Stop Staring, by Jason Osipa
2) A review of Timothy Albee's Facial Animation (TAFA) software by Mac Reiter
3) A tutorial using the principles espoused in the book to animate a characters face

The animations linked below demonstrate 3 stages of creating facial animation, as outlined in my article.

The animations are encoded in the Flash format, so they will play on any computer that has the Flash 8 plugin installed. Upgrading to the lastest version of the plugin is worthwhile - the video quatlity is awsome and filesize is small. Click on the image or the link to play them to your computer. Each will open in a separate window to facilitate comparison. You might want to watch the "Final" first...

Step 1. Mouth Open/Close (1.5 MB)

Step 2. Emoting, but not acting (1.5 MB)

Step 3. Final (2 MB)

This is the first stage of creating a facial animation per the techniques outlined in the article.

It is done using only 3 morph targets:
MouthOpen
MouthWide (smiling)
MouthNarrow (the "ooo" shape).

As mentioned in the article, its quite amazing how much lipsynch can be accomplished with just 3 morphs (2 tracks in TAFA).

To be fair, I didn't nail this in the initial pass at open/close/wide/narrow, the morphs were tweaked as the facial animation was refined.

In this animation, the rest of the facial features are animated.

Note that all head and body movements, as well as the eye movements, are to be done in a 3D animation program, in this case, Lightwave.

TAFA can play this back in real time (in a shaded view, not rendered).

The facial animation data is exported as a Morph Mixer file from TAFA and then imported into Lightwave via the Morph Mixer Control Panel.

The rest of the animation is created using Lightwave's other tools, mostly bones.

While refining the animation using AURP (Almost Universal Refinement Procedure), popping back into TAFA to tweak the animation and re-exporting to Lightwave is a quick and painless procedure.

Thanks to Jonny Gordon - Zero Gravity Entertainent -for his excellent "Aboriginee" model (on the LW8 Content CD), and to Lernie Ang for generously helping with the lighting of the cabin scene (and for all the great LScripts he's made available to the Lightwave Community over the years).