Hello Exciting Friends!

I recommend every iCloner go out and rent, buy, or steal "The Lord of the Rings" Special Deluxe Extended Version. I'm sure everyone has seen the movies a million times but the Special Features included on the DVDs are freaking amazing for artists to watch. Each movie is now FOUR dvds. There are different audio commentaries -- it's just amazing and inspiring.

There is a long section about animating Gollum. Now, these movies are almost 10 years old, so it seems that most of the techniques they discuss on the DVD are achievable with iClone. Basically they rotoscoped most of Gollum's body motion and face motion -- they did not use much motion capture at all.

I notice in most iClone videos, including my own, there is no facial animation except for the eyes blinking and the mouth moving.

Anyhow, thusly inspired, I set about to animate a character and to animate the face. I was very happy with the results-- adding just the slightest bit of animation to the face

Animating the face is like animating the hands --- the hands don't need to do anything specific, they just have to look like they are alive. So adding bits of facial muscle motion helped the character look alive without giving the face any specific direction.

Does anyone actually animate faces with iClone? I have never seen a single example-

DISCLOSURE: One of my friends is an professional animator/artist who WON AN OSCAR a couple of years ago for his animated film. He teaches facial animation for Maya. That's why I care. That's why I'm interested in seeing iClone "mature" in the way that other animation packages have matured.

For close-up shots, isn't that what Reallusion's companion software CrazyTalk is for?

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| iClone 5 Pro | 3DXchange 4 Pro | popVideo Converter 2 | CrazyTalk 6 Pro | CrazyTalk Animator Pro |

Well....I guess I'm clueless , don't answer that, but I thought the "Facial Puppet" under the Animation/Facial Animation Tab was used for facial animation. I tried it a bit in my new Pinhead movie and was pretty happy..still need more practice with it for sure.


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The facial animation features were one of the main factors I looked at when I started looking into iClone. Usually, I record dialog, then use that to auto-generate the mouth motion. Then I use keyframes to clean it up if needed. Then, I go back through about 5-10 more passes using the facial puppeteering features to get more realistic motions. I think the results are pretty good!

It's true that most of the videos you see here on the forum are just using stock motions dancing around, but those are also just there to show off the sets or clothing, not really the animations. Don't take that to mean that people aren't using the tools for "real" animation work, too!

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I *did* use CrazyTalk 6 to "animate" the mouth. It was quick and easy to get good results...

It's animating the rest of the face that makes the difference.

Here's a quick clip of one of mine...



I used the "solo feature" on the puppeteering menu, and made a pass for each control box - blink, eyes, tilt, etc. I especially like how the brows turned out. Also, make sure to check the "edit property" options to change the weighting of each feature. Using this, you can give each character a facial characteristic that becomes a part of their personality. That may be a lot of "repetitive tweaking," but by doing it by hand each time, you can ensure that each facial animation matches the personality of the character, and the situation of the scene.

Now if I could just make his arm motions look as good as his face!

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I have been using CrazyTalk 5 for facial animation together with iClone 3 (which doesn't have the puppeteering feature that iClone 4 has). The speech is converted to mouth positions, after that you can do additional passes. The conversion is not flawless and CrazyTalk lets you tweak the visemes, which you can't do with iClone.

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Hi,

I generally put facial animation in my iClone works, including this last piece released:-

https://forum.reallusion.com/FindPost82768.aspx

enjoy, mAD mELLOR mAN

OK swoop, I'll bite. I thought the pros were pragmatic till the cows come home. They like to complain about "cheating" by rotoscoping video reference, but they all do it. They complain about "cheating" by mocap, but as soon as it became practical, they all started doing it, too. I bet they complain about taking shortcuts to avoid animation, but they all do it.

My real question, I guess, is: if the viewer can't tell the difference between puppeteering and bone animation, does anybody care? CAN anybody tell the difference?

General Picture - animating now to life itself(tm)
Member of Content Wizards

I guess this conversation has derailed completely and here's my two cents.

I doubt anybody using iClone is LOOKING TO BE HIRED by anyone. Actually, the idea of working in an animation house doing someone else's work sounds PRETTY DEPRESSING.