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| Help for Facial Rigging Using both a Jawbone and Morphs
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Hello all, I am running into a bit of problem and hope someone here can give some insight or suggestions. I’m using Max 2010 for this particular exercise.
I’m doing some character facial rigging, and in the past have used the Morpher modifier to create my various expressions, and it works nicely. But now I am running into situations where I’d like to use a bone to move the jaw (in the manner that a real mandible moves the mouth) and combine it with the Morpher so that the two working together (bone plus Morpher) can produce a range of expressions with the bone opening and closing the mouth and the Morpher dealing with everything else, such as lip positions, simulation of facial muscles and so on.
On balance, it’s all pretty obvious. Everything works like it should in fact, BUT, where it turns into a bit of a puzzle is that I cannot sculpt morph targets in Mudbox like I used to. When using only Morpher, without a jawbone, I was able to just take the model into Mudbox, move the mouth and chin to whatever position I wanted, opened or closed, and sculpt it to my heart’s content. Now, though, unless I am sculpting the “skin pose” of the model, any sculpt I do is going to be further changed by the motion of the jawbone.
For example, let’s say I want to sculpt a character with a big open-mouthed smile. If the skin pose and default position of the jawbone is closed, then if I were to open the mouth and snapshot the mesh with the mouth open, then sculpt that in Mudbox to the smiling shape I want, if I then go back and add that to my Morpher, and use it, the morph will happen with the jawbone still in the closed position. In other words, the character will morph to have a big open-mouthed smile, just fine, but the jawbone will not have moved. The problem is…
I want to use the jawbone to control the motion of the teeth and tongue inside the mouth, keeping them as their own separate meshes and linking them to the jawbone. As you can imagine, having a character break into a huge open-mouthed grin while their teeth stay closed and detach from the lower jaw is something that may be amusingly horrifying, but is only good for scaring small children, not so much for making a nice animation. It only gets worse when you then move the jawbone and watch the mouth open even more, ending up with a detached set of lower teeth hovering inside an unnaturally cavernous mouth!
So basically, while everything is doing what it’s supposed to, I myself am having a logistical nightmare trying to make it work out for a character. Does anyone have any workflows, tutorials or suggestions for this kind of situation? Am I making things needlessly complex? I’d love some input on this, because the idea of being able to link the teeth and tongue to a bone which also could control the lower jaw is great, but getting it to work with morphs is making my head hurt.
I truly appreciate any ideas or input!
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Hi Verticality,
I’m not an expert in this area, but I have used a simple bone and morph setup on a character head. It had one bone to control the lower jaw, and morphs for controling expressions. In order to get the results I wanted, I had to ensure that the Morpher modifier was below the Skin modifier. In the example of having a open-mouth smile, I would guess that creating the closed mouth smile as a morph and using the bone to control the open/closed state of the mouth would get you most of the way. Then any fine-tuning of the mouth in the open position could be done with the Skin-morph modifier (I have not tried this myself but I believe it’s doable). A plugin that may be helpful is the MorphX2 plugin from Lumonix. It’s a free plugin and is suited for doing ‘correctional’ morphs.
I also recommend Intermediate Rigging DVD #4 from CG Academy which covers facial rigging. Hope that helps, cheers!
3DS Max 7, 8, 2010
Windows Vista 32 bit.
Intel Quad Core
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Emat3d, thanks for the reply! Everything you said about the workflow is dead-on from my experience, and normally the approach of making a closed-mouth smile and opening the mouth would work great! In this case, though, I have to very specifically duplicate some open-mouthed expressions based on a model sheet, which is what’s giving me fits. As in, if I make a closed-mouth smile and then use the jawbone to open it, it does in fact give me a nice open-mouthed smile with the teeth following properly, but not the exact smile I am required to make for the character according to the model sheet. When working with 100% pure Morpher, following a model sheet is pretty easy since I can just sculpt every expression to be exactly how it’s needed, but in this case, working out how to make it happen while integrating a jawbone is what’s giving my brain a workout.
To your suggestions though, I never thought of Skin Morph! That’s brilliant and I am going to rush and experiment with it. For some reason, it never came to me to try using Skin Morph with a facial animation, though I am used to using it for every other part of the body. That’s why I knew it would be beneficial to post my problem here, since someone outside with a fresh perspective could see what I am missing. :) I’m quite excited about trying out Skin Morph to solve the problem now and I have a feeling it will either solve it entirely or give me a great edge on getting where I need to go. As soon as I read where you mentioned Skin Morph I was like “DOH! Of course!” Thanks for that!
About the Lumonix link, that was really interesting, and thanks for pointing out their stuff. Not only was MorphX2 intriguing and something I want to try out, but they had another app called Puppet Shop that looks like it would be fun to mess with, and it’s all free? I was rather astonished! I’m definitely going to try those.
As for the CG Academy DVD #4, I was actually looking at that, as it mentioned what sounded like a solution to the situation, but I couldn’t glean enough info from the description to be sure it was going to address this problem. That is, I didn’t want to get it, then realize it was showing me what I already had covered.
Thank you again for your reply, it was most helpful, and I am excited about trying Skin Morph to solve this. :)
Author: Verticality
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| Replied: 15 November 2009 12:38 PM
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Glad that I could be of help!
Author: Emat3d
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| Replied: 16 November 2009 12:30 PM
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You are in a position that I find hard to explain to other people how to deal with, they are always looking for the easy way and there just isn’t one. You need to sculpt the mouth into the positions that you need with the mouth closed. All targets are additive on top of the bones. In Max you can deal with it a couple of different ways.
On the original model skin the jaw and open it, then place an edit poly modifier below skin and model the face to how you need it with show end result on. This way you can see what the changes are doing. Another is to add morpher to the bottom of the stack and load the target that you are going to use, turn it up to 100 and then turn on Automaticaly Reload Targets. You can then open the jaw and then model the target watching what the end result is in the final model.
When using MB for doing this it will become more difficult. As you get into more complex facial setups you will find more and more that it is a bit of a dance back and forth to try and get what you want but it is all worth it.
Paul Neale
PEN Productions Inc.
penproductions.ca / paulneale.com
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Paul thanks for the reply! Sorry it took me so long to respond, and I agree, there sure isn’t any easy way to handle this kind of situation, but the insights from people do help a lot. I have been working on some other areas but now I’m heading back into this, so I’m going to be putting some of these methods to work. Personally, I think this is an area of 3D character rigging that would be of interest to a lot of people! There isn’t really any outright obvious information available on it that I have seen, but for people who have to work from a character sheet, where they have to maintain certain expressions on a character at different states of mouth width, this can get quite challenging.
I think the trouble and mental gymnastics involved is definitely worth it, though, so I’m going to keep with it! Thank you again for taking the time to respond.
Author: Verticality
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| Replied: 10 December 2009 06:23 AM
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