Facial Poses!

I asked Justin Thomas to take a shot at pushing the facial poses to their limits and this is what he came up with! Extremely nice results! I did some nicely lit renders to get an idea of what the SSS skin will look like when we start rendering animation. Also, I was thinking the eyebrows might be an issue because they have the sharp point on top. But now that I see these renders I think it adds a lot to him.

I have a bunch of morph target cleanup that I'm working on now, which should be finished this weekend. Then Sulz will be finished with the body so I'll start rigging and skinning.

Facial Joysticks Coming Along

I'm almost finished hooking all of the joysticks to the Morphs. I decided to replace the spline joysticks with low-poly sphere objects because they are easier to select quickly. I'm still in the process of replacing them all, as you can see. I quickly posed an angry face here for Dr. Sulz and I think it turned out really nicely. I feel like the rig has so much more control than my last joystick driven rig. Next - I'm going to finish hooking up these joysticks and then do a few missing morph targets. After that - on to the full body rig!

Oh, and John S. at Firaxis helped me with creating an eight-morph radial joystick for the mouth shapes. I asked him randomly and he created in 15 mins! Extremely helpful seeing that I hurt my brain trying to figure it out for hours the night before.

Story Updates

Julie went over the script tonight and started coming up with some great ideas on how to make the short version of the story feel more cohesive. We talked about a few of the ideas and I think they will make the story much stronger. None of the ideas make the story longer (actually, in some cases they make it shorter) but instead are just different ways of going about the scenes. The main scenes are unaffected like the beginning and the Carmen / Peter fight. These changes are more focused on the in between scenes. I will bring in the updated script next week.

Facial Interface

Tonight I finished the creation and placement of the facial joysticks. Right now I'm not sure if it's too complicated so I'd like some feedback (Justin?). It has more joysticks than my old characters but I think it also will have a lot more control over the face. Once I get it all hooked up I will be able to tell.

The 1st image is the interface linked to Peter's head. You could use it this way if you'd like or you could unlink the whole interface and move it to the side. I have a feeling I will unlink it but the option is there.

The 2nd image is the interface scaled way, way up with the morphs placed next to the corresponding joysticks. I did this so when I hook up the joysticks (tomorrow night) it will be very easy to know what morph is affected by joystick.

The 3rd image is just the interface as you would use it unlinked from the character. The smaller joysticks around the eyes affect only parts of the eyelids up/down. The smaller joysticks around the lips only affect parts of the lips up/down. I feel it's easier to work with everything being visual and in one place. That's why I created the small joysticks instead of creating custom attributes on the smile/frown joystick for the lip up/down movements. The custom attributes would only show up when the joystick was selected and it would be a spinner, which I find is harder to use quickly.

Morphs Mirrored!

I was able to quickly mirror all of the morph targets after figuring out I didn't need to repeat the whole mirror-morph-skinwrap process on every target. I did it once and then replaced the morph target in the slot, created a snapshot of the skinwrapped mesh and renamed it to the left target. Very easy. Right now it's 113 morphs for Peter. I think version one had 60 or so. I still have to fix a few targets but I'm going to move on. I'm now starting on the face joystick interface but don't have enough to show yet. I will have that in a day or two.