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.