Hey everyone. In this tutorial we’re going to talk about how you can customize the expression system in Character Creator 4 using the Facial Profile Editor. By default, all CC Avatar characters will have a facial profile by default, either Traditional, CC Standard, or Extended. If you want to learn more about these individual profiles, please check out the CC4 introductory tutorial introducing Reallusion facial profiles. All the default profiles are used to simulate normal human expressiveness, however if you want to have a more extreme or cartoonish profile, you’ll want to customize your facial profile to accommodate the stronger expressions. Let’s take a look at the basics of the Facial Profile Editor first, using this CC3 + vampire character. You can find the Facial Profile Editor under the Animation tab of the Modify panel, from the Window menu at the top, or else by using the F8 hotkey. Once you’re in the Facial Profile Editor panel, you can click the Edit Expression button to enter into edit mode. Here you’ll see several main sections, including Expression, Viseme, and Expression Tools. Under the Expression section, you can see that our character is using a standard CC4 profile. If we mess around with a few of the sliders, you can see that they’re all fairly normal for regular human expressions. In the Viseme section, you can see that the character is using the 8+7 Phoneme Pair, meaning that the character uses 8 lip shapes and 7 tongue positions. The process of editing the lips is the same as for expressions, so in this video I’m only going to demonstrate editing the expressions. At the bottom of the panel you’ll see an Expression Tools section with some editing tools that we can use later. Let’s take a look at editing our character’s standard expressions with morph editing. You can see our standard left eyebrow raise morph slider here, pretty basic. To make it a bit stronger, let’s first use the Open Modify Morph button to bring up our morph list, which is used to modify both face and body. In Edit Expressions mode, all shaping adjustments will not affect the character’s original mesh, only their expressions. It will also ensure that the morph filter has automatically switched to Expression, so we can only see those relevant morphs. So let’s go ahead and find the Brow morph slider under Expressions and adjust it, then click the Quick Update icon on the relevant slider in the Expression profile. I can copy that same adjustment to my character’s right eyebrow as well if I want, by clicking the Mirror Expression Data button on the left brow. Once I do, you’ll see that now both brows will have the same stronger morph value. It’s basically the same process for all other facial morphs, just make the adjustment, quick save, and then mirror. Let’s take a look at split sliders next. If a character is using a CC4 Extended profile, there will be more blend shapes available for more enhanced control over expressions. For example, this pouting expression is controlled by a combination of four separate sliders with the ‘Funnel’ in the name. If I click the Link button on one of them, then it will link the values of all four of them together. We can also use additional morphs to make the lips thicker. I’ll then go into the Morph Slider Editor by clicking the Edit button on one of the sliders in my profile. You’ll see two options enabled. Only Current Slider means that we will save the results to only that selected slider, even if the expression is a combination of a number of different sliders. The Split Part option means that it will save this expression to the four sliders together, each with their own contributing adjustment. If I select that and then select Current Morph, you’ll notice that each of them will retain a separate part of the adjustment, and you can still link them to move the sliders together simultaneously. In certain cases, you may want to edit your character’s mesh to edit your expression profile, so let’s take a look at that. Again we’re using a CC4 Standard profile, and you can see that the Eye Wide sliders don’t really have a very exaggerated effect. The morph sliders can enhance this effect to an extent, but this time, let’s use the Edit Mesh tool to for more detailed tweaking of those values. Let’s enter Edit Mesh mode first, and you’ll see the wireframe appear. I have Soft Selection enabled in the Vertex section, which allows us to edit the position of vertices at various strengths from the center of the selection area. I can simply select a central area and then use my transform gizmo to bring the upper and lower eyelids further apart. Once I’m done, I can again use the Quick Update and Mirror buttons to transfer the same values over to the other eye. If I make a mistake in my mesh editing and I want to reset it, I can always use the Reset button at the bottom of the Facial Profile Editor to restore things back to their original values and try again. Aside from morph sliders and editing the mesh, we can also adjust the proportion or bone position of our facial bones to alter expressions as well. I'm going to click on the Proportion button here, which will bring up the facial bones of my character. The end nubs on these bones are connected to things like the eyes and teeth in this case. There is also a main jaw bone and one for the lower teeth set as well. We can move these in combination to get a bit more of an exaggerated mouth opening expression, and then again go ahead and do the Quick Save on our Jaw Open slider to save the results. The Proportion tool is really useful when you find facial elements like eyes, teeth or tongue in the wrong place. As you can see here, I’m adjusting the issue of the teeth poking through the side of the face by modifying the position of their respective bones. A little adjustment and a quick save should be all that’s required. When you’re done your adjustments, you can use the presets in the Animation player to test out your character’s facial performance. After exiting Edit Expression mode, I can open up the Animation Player panel and select a test sequence for my character’s facial motion. These calibration animations will help you refine your character’s facial expression performance You can also add your own custom expression sliders as well. For example, a combination of these three sliders gives my character this funny shocked expression. If I click on the New Slider button, the Expression Slider Editor will again pop up. There is a Custom category I can save to here, and name my expression. If you want, you can also import in a custom bitmap as a thumbnail. Once that’s done, you’ll see a new Custom Category appear with my custom named slider, which will combine all 3 of the slider values I previously defined. Repeat that process as much as you like to have quick and easy access to any number of custom full expressions that you want in your profile. After you’re finished, then it’s time to save your profile for future use with other CC Avatar characters. Simply go up to the Save icon near the top and choose a name. You can load the same profile at any time by using the Load icon Once you’re done with your custom profile, you can send it to iClone for use with iClone’s various motion tools. Once in iClone, you can use the Face Key Editor for all sorts of detailed facial performances. There is a Muscle section where you can use the reference image to adjust blend shapes as a group or individually, by clicking on the individual section. There are also Expression presets which are similar to the ones we just created in CC4. Both of these contain the standard expression sliders of your facial profile. The Modify section contains a list of all of morphs listed in your profile, including the custom expressions we just created. You also have the option to use the Facial Puppet tool in order to use your mouse to preview and record expressions in real-time. That’s it for this video guys, be sure to check out our other facial expression profile tutorial on creating expression for a humanoid character. I’ll see you in the next video.
