Add Facial Animation and AccuFace Mocap (Part 9/9) | Character Creator ZBrush Pipeline

all right you may have noticed the lighting's changed on my face we're going to hop into iclone and do some ACU face capture uh but before we do that I'm going to set up our character creator scene so again we're in character creator right now uh I don't need the ax for where we're going so I'm going to delete this out of our scene here and I'm going to send this over to iclone we're going to do some quick uh Roco moap that I captured to iclone drop it in on our character here do some retargeting do some facial capture animation uh just to kind of give you a brief overview and I not an expert at any of this stuff I'm just kind of I watch some videos I figured I'd show you how easy it is to kind of step into that ecosystem um and maybe that'll wet our appetites to uh continue further into that direction so just really quickly what I'm going to do is I'm going to take our uh our character here that's you know can animate and walk he's all set up we're going to go in here to file export and say send to iclone all all right so that opened up our character in iclone and you'll see if you're familiar with character creator iclone isn't a whole lot different you got your scene over here we have our character over here with all the character Parts in it and our content folder Etc so we'll go ahead and walk through how to get some animation from makoko into here and then we'll do some retargeting so I'm going to hop into Roco Studio I've already got a clip loaded up so this is a clip that I captured I can kind of scrub through it and it's just me you know walking around actually it's a little bit longer than this I can drag this back so it's me CH testing out my facial capture testing out my finger capture testing out my body capture here I'm only going to take a section of this so we'll say maybe up here as I scrub through as I'm turning we'll go through here I'll tap my tummy I'll tap my head I'll clap my hands do some finger guns and then we're out so with this portion of our animation selected we're going to export this as an fbx uh with a mixo preset I think everything else looks fine here uh Time start time of the clip is zero include reference post checked on so we'll say export Clips I'm going to open that folder and I'm going to rename this Ione test I'm going to drop this on my desktop and then we'll hop over into iclone and then from my desktop I'm just going to drop that iclone test onto my character here so as I hover over the character you'll see there's a square bounding box around him let's go ahead and drop them on there we're going to choose our motion profile file as motion Builder uh the motion T pose we're just going to reload in that iclone test that we dropped in here uh 30 60 frames we'll drop that down to 30 frames a second everything else looks fine we'll say convert all and what that's going to allow us to do is go through here and bring in our animation file so as our character is moving around uh we can add facial animation to this character but first we're going to retarget some of this character so if I scroll down actually let's let's do this let's go in here to window workspace uh choose all panels and then uh we don't need the curve editor for this and so now I have everything set up I have my character in here and we also have the iclone test underneath this motion section in my time slider here so as I scrub through you'll see we have uh some motion we need to change so one really fun easy way we can do is make some big overall changes so if I rightclick this uh motion layer and we choose use motion modifier that'll bring up a window where we can do kind of some broad Strokes changes I'm going to hit this preview button and then it's going to say press space key to preview hold down this or press the space bar and that'll just cycle through the animation so while it's doing that what I'm able to do with the overall animation is I can exaggerate the upper body exaggerate the lower body I can even lock the lower body if I want um here we have some leans and some necks and some headb backs you'll see I'm kind of looking down um you know because I actually have the facial capture down here so what I can do is I can go through here and I can you know move the head back a little bit so I'm looking more upwards you know so that's an easy change to make you also not notice here on shoulders down if I crank this to the right he'll constantly be like shoulders up like he's shrugging and then as I drop this down it's more of a natural pose this way so I'm going to drop those shoulders just a bit uh lower elbows here here's elbows out you know here's elbows in so I'm going to find a nice natural uh position for the elbows here out out a little bit it's looking good and then elbow in you know here they are kind of truncated inwards and then elbow outs a little bit too far but it's actually not too bad yeah I think this will work fine so these are our broad Strokes changes that we're doing I'm going to go ahead and uh hit space bar to stop that hit okay and now when I play through the animation uh he's a little bit more natural looking his head's up but we still got to fix some stuff you can see the hands because again I'm Different proportions than uh this character is uh so the hands aren't going to just exactly match up for my moap soup now I am going to stop this animation here at like frame one let me see here looks like frame uh 354 I'm going to go in here to edit while project settings are right here going go ahead and end our timeline at 354 so it just Loops there there we go so now let's go ahead and retarget or fix some of the hands clipping through our body so it's actually pretty easy as I go through here I'm going to scrub through the timeline and right before I enter the belly what I'm going to do is I'm going to transition from the moap data to a motion layer so I can have like an additive layer or a layer that I can change on top of the motion layer so I can fix the interpenetration on the body so what I'm going to do is go over here to our motion tab which should again look familiar to you if you're used to CC Character Creator and you're going to see there's an edit motion layer so go ahead and open that up uh this brings up another familiar window so again all the stuff we've learned in character creator is absolutely applicable here in iclone so uh here's the problem hand I can either select it in here and again you have ik mode FK mode or pose mixer I can go ahead and just select the hand in here and with that ik controller selected uh again right before I go in and slap my belly here I'm going to set a key about here so I'm going to go ahead and set the key and this is where it's going to transition from map data to my uh updated data so I'm going to go all the way so the hand kind of interpenetrates in the belly here I'm going to hit W on my keyboard and we're going to move this hand out and it we'll even rotate the hand a little bit so that it's a little bit more natural and again just kind of move this hand out so it Conta attacks with my belly here and you have a full hand control as well so if you want to go through here and like you know grab the finger you can go through and you know pull this out change the thumb anything you want to do to correct this hand here uh once we're done we can go ahead and hit set key so as we're moving in now when I go in and hit it's going to stop here perfect and again if you want to change any of these keys while you're in here go for it I'm just going to go ahead and leave it alone it's good enough for now and then as I start to transition to another pose what I can do is go ahead and say okay this has all been generally fixed so as I start to pull away I'm going to set another key and then once I'm here and I'm transitioning I'm going to hit reset this is going to put it back to the map data so now I'm going from fixed animation over back back to map data here and we're going to do the exact same thing for the head so so as I'm going up so here's where I'm supposed to be tapping my head so I'm going up here I'm going to go ahead and say set key and now we're into the fixing data so I'm going to go all the way up to my head here um until I you know tap it so here I am all the way down this is where I'm making contact with my skull I'm going to hit W on my keyboard with this hand or this uh controller selected we're going to move this up in space so that again I am tapping my head here I'll go ahead and rotate my wrist a little bit and again if you need to change any of these like if this is the bones are too bright or the controllers are too big you can go into the controller settings and you can change their size and their overall opacity is same thing for the bones you can change the bone size and the bone opacity if you'd like or we can see our character a little bit better now so again I'm going up here on my head I'll go ahead and with this selected say set key so now my hand goes up I can tap my head and then as I start to bring it down I'll go ahead and say set key again and then as I'm moving away from the body I'll hit reset so now I'm going again from our changed animation back to our map and then here's where I clap my hands together again where hands aren't making contact here so we'll go in here and then right before as we're going in we'll go ahead and say uh we'll do it for both hands here we'll go ahead and say uh set key and then now we're in our here's where they should be making contact right here so I'm going to go ahead and rotate this in and we'll move these so that they're close together and rotated like so and then I bring the hands apart as we're dropping down by their sides we'll go ahead and do another set key for both of these and then as we swing to the left we'll reset so we're back on map so now again we go through here our hands will clap and make contact and they'll fall to our sides and then we can do finger guns so now if we play through we'll go ahead and close that tap our belly tap our head clap our hands together finger guns so now let's talk about facial animation uh I'm going to go ahead and save this file here and just while I'm testing out facial animation I'm going to go ahead and just delete our motion out of here because I just want to like you know focus in on the face here and in fact let's even since again we're so familiar with the content folder in the scene folder here we can go to content let's go in here to Stage Lightroom here let's switch our lighting over here to Authority give it some nice Moody lighting while we're in here and looking at our face uh in fact let's go go ahead and let's go back to our scene here let's grab that point light and I'm going to hit W on my keyboard and we're going to bring this point light down just a bit so I can see the face a little bit clearer and I'm going to let my face control it so let's go into plugins motion live I have a couple that I can use I can use uh my iPhone with live face or I can use ACU face I'm going to choose let's do ACU face and in order to turn this on I'm going to launch the ACU face window and hey there's my face it's actually just capturing you can use a webcam uh in fact in ACU face you can even use video we're going to be using webcam but you can do well let me just talk about this real quick and again I'm not an expert at this I've been playing it for with it for like five minutes but we do have a uh it's coming from our cam link source so this is what I've been using to capture my face the whole time um you can do a tracking mode which a static cam which is what this camera is it's a static camera uh or you can change it to head cam if you've got one of those head tracking cameras uh 1920 x 1080 is what we're using F frame tracking at 50 frames a second it's what my camera is doing um you can limit the tracking angle so if your head moves too much your character won't you know it'll hit some certain limits so it doesn't break your character um I don't think we'll need that um there's some tracking interference if you're having problems with like eye blinks causing weird eyebrow or mouth issues you can turn these on and then there's also a calibrate facial capture uh here we're in the camera section which you can see uh here we have video so if you want to bring in video and then capture face from the video it can or you can and you can also use that uh your animators can use that to go in and dial in shapes later on because there's a whole lot of massaging you can do with this data but I'm going to go and leave it on camera uh let's go ahead and calibrate our face we'll say calibrate facial capture here so I'm going to look at the face here and I'm going to say neutral face and I'm going to say set expr ression so here's my neutral and then we're going to do a brow raise and then a brow drop and then a brow interray um okay so I think we're good I'll go a and close that window out and then uh so now that we have ACU face I have my uh internal IP which should match up with this and it looks like it does so now I can turn this on it'll go ahead and connect oh another thing too I should do this ACU face click this button right here this will keep it window is always on top so we can just leave this here I'm going to leave this here and we're going to have both of these kind of showing so you can see my face you can see it updating his face here in fact we could even bring this timeline down so we've connected acup face now we need to tell my character I'm using acuf face I'm going to go down here to the face and I'm going to say use acuas all right so now I can preview so I'm going to hit preview and then I'm going to hit space bar and you're going to see so I'm going to look at you and move my face and you're going to see his face update I can't see it because I'm looking at you but hopefully you can see that it's working and I'm moving my head around and I'm talking and opening my mouth and doing my eyebrows and it should be capturing to my face um oh so again while that's happening I love seeing this by the way um while that's happening I can be recording this as motion to my map so let's go ahead and uh do that now that you can see how the face thing works so I'm going to go ahead and hit space bar to stop previewing and we'll go ahead and open up the file we were playing around with so again we have a file with animation there's no facial animation on this guy but while he's animating we can record new facial animation so again we got acuf face turned on and connected our character here we're going to choose ACU face uh and then again we can preview I I'm trying to get my head on here at the same time so we can preview or we and or we can record so I'll go ahead and we can in fact we can record we can turn on audio uh visim track it'll record from my source you can use uh acuy optimization there's strength and D noise and smoothing you can do and obviously all sorts of really cool stuff you can do with this that I haven't dived into yet again I've been playing with this for a very short amount of time uh but hopefully this again this is kind of our introduction to doing some really really cool stuff outside of character creator so let's go ahead and I guess we'll just hit record hit the space bar and as I'm working around I'm going to Pat my belly Pat my head clap my hands and finger guns so now I'm hopefully this will work good I mean the face went there we've got visemes and acul lips and stuff we can go again I haven't touched any of this stuff so we'll have videos on this also keep in mind we haven't done any custom facial expressions so all the facial expressions he's making are default along with the default expression wrinkles because we haven't gotten into face tools yet I do want to mention if you want to look at face tools you can go to my live streams here and it's this one right here this character creator face tools and zbrush uh this is a live stream that we did where we took you know a default head and put Kevin's wrinkles on it and then we made actually here's the one minute overview so again taking a default head going in and sculpting it you know a custom head and then you know wrinkling up and making it all detailed and stuff and going in there and doing custom facial wrinkle and animation stuff so this is all stuff we're going to do in a bit but um I just wanted to give you a sneak preview and there's a live stream on it if you want to skip ahead so anyway I hope you had as much let's move my face over here um hope you can see how fun this is and how approachable it is and it's not rocket science and and you can take your character creator character throw it in iclone do some cleanup do some facial capture uh again we haven't dived into animation just yet but give me some time and we'll have a little bit of fun with that and then going into all sorts of uh different programs after this so um again stick around and we'll get to those videos and actually before I leave this is just too cool so let me scoot my head over this way and we'll play This Bar and as I'm working around I'm going to Pat my belly Pat my head clap my hand and finger gun all right let me just see if I can Loop this real quick play it bar and as I'm working around I'm going to Pat my belly Pat my head clap my hands and finger gun bar and as I'm working around I'm going to Pat my belly Pat my head clap my hands and finger gun so anyway yeah that worked great so again once we get diving deep into all the cool you know massaging of this data and doing a really good job as opposed to just taking defaults and seeing what happens um I think it'll be really fun and exciting

Channel: Reallusion

Views: 2,438

Keywords: game character, Character Base, rigged 3D character, Talking Game Character, video game development, character maker, custom character, avatar maker, realistic cartoon character, animated character, rigged character, character builder, realistic avatar creator, create a character, make your own character, make a character, character design generator, ZBrush, ZBrush plug-in, character face, ZBrush tutorial, Michael Pavlovich, 3D character making software, animation software

Id: caN61j8uRMQ

Length: 18min 1sec (1081 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 20 2024