Blending Expressions With Puppeteer - Daz Masterclass #27

[Music] finding the right expression is so so super important for any character portrait I find I spent far too much time looking at what is the correct expression what's the perfect expression for a portrait because I feel it's like a make or break of a good character portray the Bland expression of the default Genesis figure really is a dead giveaway that this is a 3D character if we want to make that believable it needs to be something that isn't that but at the same time we don't want to go overboard and overdo it as I has to be a certain amount of subtlety in there and I find that really really difficult and I don't know maybe you feel the same way so let me share with you the tips of dialing in the correct expression with a magic tool called Puppeteer we've already seen that expressions are essentially the same use the same building blocks as poses so we can use single click Expressions that will just get loaded on our character much like we have single click poses that can be loaded we can then go and refine them if we want but mostly expressions are saved not like poses they're often morph dials that we can go and dial in and out with a certain amount of strength with poses this is different because they're either in a pause or they're not in a pae there's not usually not a slider in that even though there is a very cool product by 3D universe that I'd like to draw your attention to in a little while which is called the poles architect which also applies the same principle we have in Expressions to poses so another way of posing characters let's talk about Expressions though if I wanted to find them in my library they're much like in poses if I go and look in my smart content I can Whittle this down to expressions and then I'll find all my products that have Expressions related to this if I stick with this one the big expressive pack for Genesis 8 I find that's quite nice there's a lot of expressions in here so we can go and select our Genesis figure I'll zoom in on her and then we'll go and try a few out so this is the annoyed one double click and that's really annoyed control Z UND does that and then we'll try the next one that's astonished or there's attractive or there's Blissful or there is cadaverous and those are oneclick expressions they work a little bit like PS you click on this and there's really only a resting phase or there's this expression there's nothing really in between under the hood often expressions and I'll just go and undo this until I'm back at my default phase under the hood though these are morph d and we can find them in the parameters Tab and they're usually in the head section here if I open that up I find a whole section that's called Expressions if I open that up I can see a list of products that I may have installed so this is a whole product here this is a whole product and some don't even have a subsection so they're just listed as this huge list of Expressions here like all the ones that are gray like these ones here they come with the Genesis figure and the red ones here they come with a pack by Dash like a dash original and and this is how they work under the hood if I go and left click and drag then I can go and dial in this expression and it's easy because it I can minimize this as well and much like any other morph dos I can add Expressions on top of one another let me just go and bring this over here that we can stay zoomed in that's quite nice so I can use concentrate together with Bard for example and then they'll both overlay one another and I can fiddle with the sliders and see which combination is my my favorite one and much like I've shown you before I can also go and make any of these my favorites by just clicking on that little heart icon here as Desire HD and often these kind of work together in combination but they also work with something else which is called the vs and they are some people call them vims I I'm I'm thinking VS kind of sounds better but I really don't know what the correct pronunciation is so vs are the mouth shapes that characters make when they speak speak certain vowels or characters so a a e o those are all the same or we make these specific mouth movements and uh characters can mimic those as well they under another section down here at the bottom which was the seams and these are all the letters that the character could potentially speak so she could say ah because she could make an expression as well as say something or there's the double e that's kind of an e or there's eh so we make you know we make mouth movements depending on that and I find that blending these things together with an expression often works really well one thing that the thees don't seem to do well is that for my personal taste they're not exaggerated enough so they're very subtle often what we need is not just we we don't if I say if I if I go to my doctor and I say ah I don't just say uh I'll just say ah I really open my mouth and my character currently doesn't do that so this this is where we need to use another one of those tricks and say hey let's get rid of the limits or increase the limit by something that makes more sense so like in this case I'm going to go to that little parameter settings and instead of a maximum value of 100% I'll say let's say 500% so I'll leave the limit in place but my slider now goes much higher and there comes a point where that looks terrible and it's up to us to make a note of that so maybe like I don't want to go over say 300% but this is more like an r that I like so this is kind kind of you know looks more like from an alien move you know so I'm going to go and go and reduce that to 300 maybe and then when I save my scene this slider will have that new default value so if I wanted to have something that suggests surprise I might go and look for that here surprise surprise HD there's that Shez that's that's very surprised but maybe on top of that I also want her to say something so I can then go into my VES and then say you know dial in a vine and then that exaggerates that and kind of overlays that and that's like a really shocked pH now yeah so the seams on top of Expressions that's a good idea and then also to have a look at what is currently dialed in we can use our currently used slider and then I can say ah so I've used the surprised expression here I didn't quite know which one I used maybe one of them needs to be dialed down and that's how I can use the same Principle as I've shown you about sliders with custom characters so endless hours of fun trying to find the right expression note that not every expression is available and some of these are just fantastic really some of these are not sliders so if I do have a slider and I may I'm I'm thinking sarcastic is nice but I want to tone it down I could just go make the slider less and blend a few together until I find my dream expression but if I had something like this and I'm thinking I'd like to go from a resting position into that then it's very difficult to blend multiple sliders into a position of multiple other sliders together and that's where a little handy tool named puppeter comes in because it lets us do this it's almost like an animation blend space that doesn't have the timeline it sounds very cryptic when I when I say it like that but let me go and reset all of these things so that we have a resting position and show you puppeter in action because especially for Expressions it comes in handy but it's also an invaluable tool for anything else like you know custom character building or pose building or literally animating your characters or moving a character's head while having the eyes follow and papete here can do it all it's it's just so good for me it's intricately linked to Expressions which is why I was thinking I'll bring it up here it has its own tab so let's bring that up either under window or we can just go to this empty space here and right click there and say add tab here and go find it under something called Puppeteer and then it'll dock itself right here on the side this is a gray kind of scary space it has layers as well so I can animate multiple parts of my character and is literally like an animation that we have to think about it it has these three modes here at the top edit preview and record we won't be dealing with the last one only with edit and preview currently I'm in edit mode and that's when I can set points anywhere on this space here and I will do that just here left click and just just left click and that'll create that little yellow spot here it will essentially set a key frame of anything and everything about my character in this position at this time if I now go and find my perfect expression like you know say rage and pleased and pain that's really not a good that's really not a good expression but maybe it is if I just tone it down a little bit I'll just show you the principle I go and click here into the space so that I have another Dot and I can now go and interpolate between these two dots in preview mode so if I do that set preview and then left click and drag anywhere in this space then I can see that my expression and all the sliders that I have set slowly and gradually blend from one position into the next if I go over there's even a point of exaggeration so it doesn't look it doesn't look great but you can see the power behind this because it doesn't just work with expression it works with anything and everything that you can dial in which is super exciting and there Alles a lot of power in D Studio that I haven't seen in other 3D applications this game engines know this as a blend space and it also allows you to set other things now if you had if I go and go back to edit reset all these and maybe go back to one of my Expressions that can't be dialed in like these ones they're one click so if I go and double click astonished then this is now going to go and load that in if I go and in edit mode set another Point here I can go and interpolate between nothing and that but it now does it gradually and if I didn't know where that slider was this is this is actually how I can do it I can use this to make figure speak if I go and put my vs on another layer and on another outside there's a lot of stuff that you can do with this you can also blend a couple of things together so if I had my super painful terrible expression here and I wanted to go into this realm I can go halfway so that is also possible with Puppeteer and I encourage you to play around with it I think for Expressions particularly as well as poses this is an absolutely amazing tool let's try another one just go with this one here and head edit if I'm thinking this is okay but it's a little bit too much I can just go and set a point here go back to preview and say well this was nothing this was that expression 100% And if I wanted to have that 50% I could just go and put it here or I just go blend it in with something else so that is really nice I can have as many points as I like just from experience I can tell you that it's usually a good idea to have a resting position in the middle so that you can go out from there and build yourself a little ring around this I don't want to make it too much about Puppeteer just know that you can create a second circle like at the bottom here and then have another resting position so I can go from here to an expression back to resting thing so I can literally have as many points as I like and I can go and just keep putting them out there this might be Blissful whoops has to happen in edit mode sorry if something like this happens and you want to reset your figure you can just go and click on one of these points in edit mode that you've already set and then that pose will be loaded in like that might take a while but it will work yeah that's nice we'll just put this here go back into preview mode and then we can literally go from here over to here over to here and then back to here and as you move your mouse you can literally go and make your figure do all kinds of things in real time which is just amazing and just as an aside just to flesh out this little tour of Puppeteer if you were to set this to record your timeline at the bottom would record all these Expressions As you move your mouth so very very clever very helpful in my next video I want to introduce you to a product called face controls that can make even better expressions with something known as a face plate it's a slightly different way of building expressions and it's an important tool to know about stay tuned for [Music] that know

Channel: Daz 3D

Views: 1,028

Keywords: Daz3d, Daz Studio, Daz 3d, 3dArt, 3dSoftware, FreeSoftware

Id: QFPhZASuHW8

Length: 12min 30sec (750 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 12 2024