Hi,
This is mainly a wish list request for Peter the forum administrator. 
I've been working just on heads for many weekends now, trying to see what the pros and cons are of each methodology. I started with morph based which I love for its ease of use. BUT I found it so frustration that on a mild head turn, the back of the head just looks chopped off. At least having the ears and back of head turning would be acceptable. Other Reallusion products seem to have morph based heads with full head turns but of course they don't have the full animation features of CTA. 
The 360 degree heads are really cool but creating 15 lip sync vectors and two noses and various eyes is quite time consuming. 
So do Reallusion have any plans to combine some of the features form 360 and morph based? For me, and I'm sure many others, this would be so cool.  I was thinking of using CrazyTalk Animator to create the heads but I think that its not possible to import them as multiple heads into CTA. That would be amazing. Is that possible? I'd happily buy that software as well if you can import multiple heads  

Another issue I have with the morph-based heads is how the custom teeth, when imported, just don't fit the different movements of the talking mouth. They just seem stuck in one place and don't open or close. Is there a good tutorial on using teeth in morph based heads?

Peter (Forum Admin) could you (or anyone else out there)  advise on what is coming in the next version to help combine morph and 360?  Or CrazyTalk and CTA? 
Thanks
Ewan, London UK.

Hi Ewan

Morph based heads and 360 degree sprite based heads use different technologies so it is not likely these will be combined in any way.

The actual process of creating 2D morph based heads is the same in CrazyTalk, CrazyTalk Animator and now Cartoon Animator. With a morph based head you should be able to turn the head a few degrees either way without any bad distortion. If you find the back of the head looks chopped off you should try adjusting the wireframe around the face and the hair as this should help. You should certainly do all adjustments in "Detail" mode so you have more fitting points available for finer adjustment.

With regards to the teeth issue, do you mean creating custom teeth using your own images or do you mean you are having problems using the supplied morph based teeth? If you can post a screenshot showing the issues you are having I'll be happy to help. 

And to see our 2020 Roadmap for Cartoon Animator 4, please click the link below.

https://forum.reallusion.com/435096/000-What-to-expect-of-CTA-in-2020


                                                                

Peter
Forum Administrator

www.reallusion.com

Peter, 
Thanks for your response.  I have made the decision that the full 360 head (Sprite based, not Smooth Mode)  is going to be too time consuming for me as a hobbyist. Creating so many mouth shapes and eyes and working with so many layers in photoshop was frustrating. I'm actually creating vector shapes in Adobe Illustrator and think I might just swap the shapes from a 360 head template without Photoshop Pipeline and just swap directly inside CA4 . I'm going to try the Smooth Mode which should really speed up my workflow at the expense of lip sync being a bit less real. So that's my preferred strategy which will get the 360 functionality plus the animation libraries for rapid development.

I'm also going to try the Morph based heads again and regarding your question to me on the teeth, I was referring to using my own custom teeth imported, because otherwise the lip sync can look really bad. The teeth can look huge, the gums not covered by the lips etc.  
Do you have any really good examples of people who have used Morph based with great results in lip syncing? I'd love to see some great examples in action other than the cute dog example? There seems to be much more online about Sprite based.... 
Thanks 
Ewan, London UK