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Sunday, August 29, 2010

Morpheus Facial OPEN Beta!


Well my internet amigos, getting closer and closer to finished here. It's been a pretty nice weekend here in the Texas sticks and I thought it was a good day to release Morphy's Facial Rig to open Beta. It's getting pretty close to done and I wanted to get some more feedback.

Download it on the new Morpheus project page . There's also WIP documentation and faqs on the page. If you have more questions, keep em comin.


What's in the pack?

  • The latest and greatest Morphy facial rig
    • Notes on some "hidden" controls
      • Smoothers are on "faceSmoothingAttributeHolder"
      • Visibility toggles on "faceVisibilityAttributeHolder"
    • For the tinkerers out there, you can use the below to find and mess with stuff:
      • First off you'll need to turn off, my group drawing overrides so you can select stuff:
        • "Geo_grp"
        • "DeformationRig"
      • "Head_RESETER_bsGeo" is a head mesh to "reset" and mirror vertices if you should be inclined to start messing with doing your own blendshapes. I use abSymMesh for mirroring and resetting.
        • Blendshapes for the facial rig are here "Facial_bsGeo_grp"
        • Blendshapes for the facial deformation are here "FacialDeformation_bsGeo_grp"
  • The last open body release (with new head referenced)
  • The referencing animation file I used to render the above test
  • Textures
    • Rough first pass at some feminine textures and different skin tones
    • Eye textures 
    • Included source .psd files if you'd like to try some variations
  • Scripts pack
    • jbMorpheusFacialCustomGeoBaker - duplicates the wrap deformer functionality without the wrap deformer
    • jbMorpheusAddHair - for easily skinning hair in
    • jbMoprheusSmoothConnect - for creating polySmooth on a selection of meshes and then connecting the divisions attribute to whatever attribute you tell it to. 
    • boTriggers - Thanks to Bohdon for letting me include them. To update the trigger selectors in referenced files, run the script and run the updater. 
What's New?
  • Facial blendshapes
    • New Lip roll, narrow, wide polish
  • Facial Deformation
    • NO MORE wrap deformers! Everything is hooked up via blendshapes, skinweights and pixie dust
    • Facial morph polish on lots of morphs
    • Weighting fixes - still not done
    • bug fix - eyebrow mover rotation mirroring working now
  • Customization
    • Instead of toggles for the eyebrows, broke them into blendshapes for even more variety
    • New hair options: Thanks to Aziz Kocanaogullair and Mary Barreiro for the great work.
    • Split out bangs for more variety with the dos. They work best with the feminine hairstyles
    • Lookin to get rigs into the ponytail and pigtails for animatability
    • Solid Teeth option - thanks Danny Garnett! He's working on some blendshapes for em too for even more variety
    • Fixed some of the ear blendshapes
    • Added full Gotee (from Aziz Kocanaogullair). 
    • Beards and gotees have blendshapes on them now to pull them out and push them in some. Rick, you should finally be able to get your crazy long gotee;)
  • Workflow
    • smoother attributes
    • parent toggles for eyes
What kind of feedback am I lookin for?
  • Facial Deformation:
    • Are there any specific controls you're not finding that you're wanting? (i.e. I've thought about adding a mouth sac scaler to avoid some of the penetration that happens at bigger scale mouth and jaws as well as a nose bridge narrower)
    • Did you come up with a cool morph you'd like me to try to incorporate? (i.e. better lip thickener or somethin?)
  • Facial Rig
    • The facial rig is an experiment in some areas and unlike any facial rig I've done before. The lip controls especially are an attempt at a new control mechanism for the same types of shapes I use in any facial rig. Thoughts?
    • If you start doing tests, are there any things you're having a hard time getting out of the rig?
  • Customization
    • Some of the customization stuff is rougher than others, if you'd like to polish things up create some new ones, by all means be my guest and I'll roll it in.
    • Thoughts on specific options?
  • Textures
    • Texturing is definitely not my strong point. The source files are there for any experts out there. I'm not 100% happy on diffuse, spec or even the colors. Just an attempt at getting something. Feel free to experiment and send your ideas.
    • Yes, my tongue shader is too shiny. See previous bullet point.
Supposed to start this gig any day now so Morphy progress will slow. The main stuff left is FK/IK snapping when limbs are stretched, connecting up the head to the body and rolling in the final face tweaks. 

13 comments:

Animetrik said...

Hi Josh, it gives error when i wanted to download latest facial beta. Can you check the link of the rar file? Take care.

Unknown said...

Yup, a guy on 11sec club pointed it out. Should be fixed now:)

Olivier Ladeuix said...

really cool, only did a quick test before going to bed
http://www.olivier-ladeuix.com/blog/uploaded_images/blog/megamorpheus.png

I have the feeling the control for the outside brows don't go far down enough

Marcos Borba said...

Hey Josh! Just one thing to say my friend! Bravo

I´ve been busy these days. But. can´t wait to take a look on this rig closely.

Take care

Jean DUVAL said...

Hey, nice work!!! I follow this wip from France. I downloaded the rig and am happy to do some test. I am just an animator and it difficult for me to understand some "script" and the other technical thing (I have more knowledge on xsi)Anyway it will fine for my future animations. thanks for this work. www.jean-duval.com

Unknown said...

Thanks Oliver, yeah I could see that with pushing the brow so far up like that if you're wanting that to be "neutral" rather than a brow up position. Food for thought.

Marcos, thanks man. Hope you enjoy it when you dig in:)

Jean, why thank you. I hope you can figure stuff out enough. Sadly, I don't speak a lick of French. I do have at least one French speaking friend and my wife does as well. Maybe I'll get some help with some translation stuff when I'm done.

notanymike said...

Hi Josh, thanks for this character! There is something I'd like to address regarding the foot IKFK switching on the body rig. I'm also learning how to rig and I've found that when I attempted to make a IKFK option for the legs, I'd run into an issue with the joint orient attributes for the FK and IK joints not being the same; so that when the switch occurs, the third chain would do a spin while blending between IK and FK. That seems to be happening with your feet as well; while it's fine when IKFK is at 0 or 1, anything in-between causes the foot to rotate into weird positions. Is that something to be concerned about? If it is, how do you fix it?

Unknown said...

It's actually something else in this case. I've got most of that fixed in my current body "wip" but I'm also taking a look another rigging option which will afford even more customization.

In regards to specifically avoiding that, I'd recommend picking up Jason Schleifer's Animator Friendly Rigging. Not only will it show you a very solid rig, it'll help you understand how to work through those very issues. Invaluable.

Sorry, gotta get back to animatin here:)

-jjb

Omar said...

Wow, this rig is amazing.
I cannot WAIT for this to be finalized! Great job!

Omar said...

Hey Josh, the only problem I've experienced so far is having the controls get lost behind the mesh when I really deform the face.
Other than that it's fantastic!

Unknown said...

Glad you like it Omar. If you could email me which deformation combinations were doing that for you, it would be very helpful. Thanks man:)

notanymike said...

Thanks for the advice Josh...I also found a simple solution to my issue, but when I get the funds I'll definitely invest in AFR...

Virgil said...

more and more impressive as time goes by :) keep it up!

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