Creating Morpher Targets for Facial Animation in 3DS Max

hi in this video demonstration we're going to take a look at more for targets which is one great way to kind of rig a characters face for animation we can get things like our phonemes to get our characters speaking talking singing etc as well as you know blinking his eyes and emoting and giving us some of those great facial expressions that we're going to definitely need as we start animating our characters so to get you going the file that you guys downloaded to go along with the video here might look a little bit different than mine as I've still got some of the texture files for you know the images for the eyes and stuff like that so they look a little bit different but overall what we've got here is a character unsmooth all by itself just the editable poly here and a couple of pair eyes because you know doing expressions without eyes in there can can just be a terrible thing to try and accomplish so to start out we've got our character he's not smooth he's not anything yet because we want to do this without any mesh smoothing to begin because for the fewer the fewer the polygons the fewer the vertices we have to manipulate the easier our lives are going to be so in order to get this going we're gonna make copies of our elfs head here and each one of those copies will be modified slightly and then we'll create some transitions for the original head to go between a whole lot of different subtle facial movements and he'll start looking like he's talking once we animate this with some keyframes and do some lip sync the one thing to note here the the most important thing is that our character's head has to start exactly the same amount of polygons no matter what we do and it has to have exactly the same vertices with a good starting point now if you go to your edible poly here and just kind of select your vertices and then pick one on the head somewhere you'll notice that vertex 5:48 selected shows in here under the selection it's taking those reference points that number there and it's taking a look at the original and it'll take a look at what we've done modify wise and it will simply move between those two creating some in-betweens for us so it's very important to know that you can't do this with just anything you also can't add polygons as we do this so things like eyelids already need to have a built in certain amount of polygons in order to successfully manipulate them here in the future if all you've gots a hole in your character's head no way to actually move these things around no eyelets to speak of you're gonna run into some trouble so make sure you model in things like eyelids and stuff like that lips and all that good stuff while you're doing a character model first and then you won't have any problems so let's get going first things first we're going to make a copy of this character's head so I'm gonna get my move tool here and I'm gonna work in my front viewport to start now I'm just gonna hold down shift and drag along the x-axis and then when I let go the clone options menu will show up I want to make sure that it says copy here because we don't want an instance because then anything I do to this one was going to happen to this one automatically so that's not gonna do us any good so we want to say copy and I want to give this one a name I like to name the first one as what it is a blank slate I'll call it template and we'll say okay this guy will always remain looking exactly as he does right now but from him I can then make copies off into the future if I decide I need another head way down the line to accomplish another facial expression or something along that line so he'll be the one I copy from from here on out now my original head I can come back to its named elf and on top of it I want to add the Morpher modifier he goes on the original head the character's head itself and then in this modifier you'll see a whole lot of empty slots here that we're going to add new targets - so they can kind of transition between any number of these different targets think about things like the movie Tim Burton did Nightmare Before Christmas and Jack Skellington and it was stop-motion but this is along the same lines Jack Skellington had over something crazy like 200 different heads that they kept swapping between in order to get him to speak sing and emote properly we're not going to go quite that crazy because luckily in 3d animations your CG animation we've got the ability to blend all of these heads to a different degree so we can come up with some different different shapes and emotions by blending two or three together but we are gonna make at least a couple here and then I'll set you off to make all the phonemes and all that stuff on your own from our template from here on out actually I can go ahead on top of the Morpher my original character I'll go ahead and I'll add that the turbosmooth or mesh smooth up to you I like the mesh because it doesn't it doesn't add any edge faces on top of things you turn those off so here's my original head looking good smooth correct on the template head here we never want to add a measurement we never ever need to get that far because we've got to keep it the same amount of polygons as our original no matter what we do from this template I'm gonna make another copy so I'm gonna hold down shift get my move tool and drag across the x-axis here I'm gonna make sure this one says copy the same and I'm gonna give this one a name we can start with things like phonemes and eye blinks so let's give this one a name that may correlate to that I'm gonna call this one a comma eye because this is going to be the Morpher target for our characters speaking those a couple of vowels a and I open his mouth wide and we'll say okay this one we're going to go ahead and modify make sure you've got the AI not the template we're gonna need that template in the future to be nice and blank blank slate from here we can go ahead and manipulate our vertices do not cut in any more edges do not in set or extrude or add any more polygons in any way all we can do is modify this head as based on vertex positions we don't want to add anything new or it just won't work so I'm gonna go ahead and get my vertex selection here and I'm gonna make a selection that is the bottom half of his mouth and jaw I'm gonna go ahead and and you notice I don't have ignore back-facing on so I'm gonna have to be a little careful here I want to go and I want to grab all the vertices on his lower lip and lower jaw I'm also going to back out once I've done that and make sure if I come over here to my left or even my at my right viewport we can see this a little bit better I want to make sure that I unselect all the ones on the back of his head for his neck and maybe where his chin kind of turns into his neck there I want to leave the ones for the bottom of his chin because opening his mouth without moving his chin is gonna look silly absolutely ridiculous all right then we can come back here to the front viewport and I'm simply going to move that jaw down a little bit at this point I'm going to unselect kind of this whole row here and you'll start to see what I'm doing all the way along and then kind of just move it out and down a little bit more and then a little bit less of my selection and maybe just a little bit more to kind of give that mouth a little bit you know different of an opening I may even go ahead and we could pretend that some of the muscles and his lips without his jaw might move slightly as well but I gotta remember that every time I make a new selection I want to make sure that I unselect anything from the back of his head otherwise that's gonna it's gonna go along with our more for target it's gonna look ridiculous there maybe I'll open his mouth just a little bit wider there okay it looks like I've got these guys on the inside of his mouth there I might want to bring them down as well just to get them out of harm's way and without adding any more polygons without cutting it anymore edges what I've done here is open his mouth I may also want to think about things like squash and stretch and all that other good stuff and I might want to move in just to maintain some volume here as he opens his mouth that stretches out his face we may want to you know just sink in his cheeks just slightly just to to keep everything stretching the way that it should for our characters add that little degree of malleability there all right once we've done with our morphic target in this case I've opened his mouth say ah ai etc we're going to come back to our original head down to the Morpher modifier in the stack and all of these nice empty target slots here we can select one of them right click and we can say pick from scene you've also got the option down here with any one of these selected to go ahead and pick object from scene or capture current state a couple of other things we're going to go ahead you can use the pick object from scene button here and then either move over and click on its head or a little bit safer I like to open up my Select by name menu and make sure I've got the AI and say pick it'll show up in that slot you'll see this nice little green bar become available to us and instead of empty it now says the name of the target a I so now when I'm animating I know exactly what this value is going to do for me coming back to my main head here I want to just show you how this works as you scroll up between zero and a hundred percent on our values next to our morphic target the transition will take effect these we can animate create keyframes to our liking and get this guy open in his mouth talking and endure a little bit crazy here as we go so that's the basic idea let's do another one of these real quickly so you can see how we kind of continue from here while that does get the idea across we might as well continue into at least one for something along the lines of an eye blink I can continue I would I would create a second copy here hold down shift drag over the side and I would continue on making my phonemes ai and then e and the consonants and all of those things and how the mouths look a little bit different but you can download the the guide that I created as well along with these things if you've forgotten exactly from intro to animation stuff like that what what phonemes are and how many we need in order to get these guys talking correctly in this case I'm gonna skip those just to show you a different thing that we can do with these morph targets and I'm going to name this one left let's say let's go right right I blink and say okay here I'm going to move over a little bit and notice we made the copy of the template that's why I've made him in the first place so that we've always got an origination point a place to start so that in the future if I get this guy attached to a body and rigged and skinned and all ready to animate and I realize oh no I forgot to add an emotion for anger and now I need one we can always come back and make more copies and more targets and load them into that Morpher modifier even off into the future so that's why I always leave a template nice and blank slate there anyway back over to our right eye blink here let's come take a look at what this is I'm going to select my vertex options and whenever you deal with the eyes before I go that far I'm gonna hunt select a vertex option then just realized I want to talk about this whenever you deal with anything with the eyes you're probably going to want a pair of eyes inside this four character skull so I'm gonna come over I'm gonna select the eyes that I've got in his head hold down ctrl to select both of them hold down shift and make some copies of them as well over here into my eye blink as well we can just say copies that's fine we can get rid of them later on but for right now this is going to show us some very important information I'm gonna go ahead and turn on by clicking this realistic up here my edge faces so I can see exactly what's happening in this head these eyes are a little bit heavy in the Polly's but they work and I want to zoom in on this guy and what I'm looking for here is as I get closer I want to make sure that not much if any is of the glassy part of his eye is kind of poking through there if I get closer and I do notice that that glassy outer shell of his eye is kind of poking through there I'll want to kind of move the eyes back a little bit and make sure that they're in his skull sadly I'll have to do this for the main object here in the end as well we might have to pull his eyes back into his head just a little bit not too much to make anything terribly different but that'll give us a good place to begin now I can select that right eye blink head and commence closing his eye they come back up to our front view I don't have the edge faces turned on there anymore what I want to do is I want to kind of drag a selection around all these guys that are at the bottom of his eyelid now remember if you didn't make enough polygons up here to close his eye let alone make sure that it rounds out around our eyeball you're gonna end up with some issues here in the future so we want to make sure that I'm only grabbing the bottom ones here I'm gonna grab the bottom here here here here here and here to get going also a good thing to remember that if I do this I need to kind of come back here and make sure that I'm not what didn't grab any on the back of his head looks like I did okay on that one but if you accidentally get diversity in the back of his head and then move his eyes closed you're going to end up doing that and that's going to be part of your more for target so we want to make sure that we've only got what we need and no more all right at this point maybe we can rotate that eyelid a little forward get move tool and start closing that eye okay I'm gonna unselect those and actually pull the rest back up here just slightly okay good I can actually unselect maybe all these guys from the middle I looks like I want to pull this over just a little bit so that those corners that I kind of start to meet they're back in my front view I can kind of select those I could take a look at my vertex count over here before I do that and realize that there's three one two down here and one up here that I'm grabbing and if I only add three then I don't have to worry about going to the back of the head making double sure that I've selected that amount three okay good and three we're good but I want to unselect the ones in the corner here and pull down even further and select these and pull down further and now we're starting to close the upper eyelid pretty well rounded out nicely then I'll start with the bottom 1 2 3 4 5 6 etc making sure that I'm not getting any extra vertices in there and then I'll pull this guy up to meet at this point I'm just going to undo that real quick while I make this other point I would unselect this I might even add a mesh smooth on top of this so that I see that that when I close this eye everything's going to be functioning properly when I come back down on the stack I can always turn that show end result toggle on there and then when I close as I've really got a perfect example or a perfect idea of exactly how far I need to take this I lit up and you know out here maybe even pull out just slightly so that everything kind of finishes rounding itself out a little bit and then finally last but not least of course we get this guy in the middle up back just a little bit until that eye is full-on closed if I've added that meshsmooth to our right I blink head I want to remember that once I'm finished to take it off because otherwise it won't recognize it is a proper morphe attorney when we add this in when i zoom out you'll probably see a little bit of our glossy edged eye kind of poking through that's just more of a bug in 3d studio as we back out it had a little trouble discerning distance as well as want to get up close but that shouldn't bother you when you render if you see anything shiny poking out here move the eyes back into the head a little bit more and you'll be fine all right what're my edge faces off no come back over to my original head come down to that more for target second one in I'm gonna right click this time and select the pick from scene from the menu that pops up come up to my select by name and choose right eye blink and now I've got the ability to make the guy wink you can now close his eye we're going to continue making these until we probably have you know some of the professional animators would have upwards of forty to forty to sixty of these different facial configurations for some severe expression you'll need at least a certain amount in order to get him speaking and you'll need at least a couple to get his eyes blinking his eyebrows raised and you know giving him some more subtle facial movements so I'll let you go from here and create several more for targets to get your two characters ready to animate in the next lesson okay

Channel: Clint DiClementi

Views: 152,887

Keywords: Autodesk 3ds Max (Software), Animation, Animated, Computer Facial Animation, Tutorial, How To, 3D, 3D Modeling, Animator, Cartoon, Character Animation

Id: O9dJCT6AuCM

Length: 20min 2sec (1202 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 22 2014