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Mask blendshape-style animations.
Hi, guys,
I need to animate simple layer mask (or possible shape layer), which have few standart positions to blend.
In my case it is a mouth of simple cartoon character, as you probably understood it should be lipsyncing. But I wouldn`t like to use just swapping pictures of it, I want to have blendinding between them. The most obvious way is to copy and paste different keys of mask path, but it`s quite unconvenient as my experience says.
Is there a way to animate it in the manner similar to most of 3d-animation software blendshape animation? Making few standart positions of mask and blending between them with the slider values?
Will be very appreciated for any ideas. -
6 Replies
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I think it would make more sense to make it with puppet pins, markers and expressions.
The reason being, you want to be able to morph between any two positions (think letters). Thre are potentially 27 x 27 = 729 letter combinations with the alphabet. So rather than creating a slider that can morph 729 different ways, you could morph between 27 positions that were set by marker names.
You would need to figure out puppet point positions for all 27 mouth positions (or actually less, many letters look the same). So it is multiple puppet tool pins per position, but then the tweens would be calculated by expressions looking at where you are between two markers.
Dan Ebberts has excellent examples of using markers for animation.
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I’m putting together a tutorial now on creating a highly articulated mouth rig using Joysticks ‘n Sliders. This involves making mask path morph shapes and tying them to sliders that bake the animation to the mask paths. Should hopefully be ready to post it soon. Here is an animation test done with it.
https://vimeo.com/169809649Some contents or functionalities here are not available due to your cookie preferences!This happens because the functionality/content marked as “Vimeo framework” uses cookies that you choosed to keep disabled. In order to view this content or use this functionality, please enable cookies: click here to open your cookie preferences.
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You, Kalle, probably don`t know how it works in 3d-software 🙂 we don`t need here to blend shapes between each other. We may blend each key pose to default pose, and when we blend from one pose to another (both non-default) we just decrease the influence (so called weight) of first pose and increase it on second. Thus we need a single slider for one pose.
Solution with puppet isn`t good for my case, because I need quite big amplitude of animation and I`m sure outputs stretched contours and not very smooth edge. -
Mike, your animation sample looks very similar to what I need. Can`t wait to see your tutorial.
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I’ve posted the tutorial on Vimeo and Youtube.
https://vimeo.com/170409373
or
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nMdEai9IxU
It’s a pretty long one.
-Mike OSome contents or functionalities here are not available due to your cookie preferences!This happens because the functionality/content marked as “Vimeo framework” uses cookies that you choosed to keep disabled. In order to view this content or use this functionality, please enable cookies: click here to open your cookie preferences.
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Haha, awesome. I was going to suggest Joysticks ‘n Sliders. I love it. I’m glad to see more tutorials on it!
Joe Clay
Workbench.tv
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