Facial Expressions?

[woah]

Models are looking very great. Just wondering if they will be incorporating facial expressions like in Doom 3 and half-life 2. I don't want these great models to look stiff and inhuman in the game. Also, will the same type of sword play that was done in Thief 2 be in the Dark Mod (Meaning that the sword is actually an object that is part of the game and just not some model that does damage within a certain area)?

[Renzatic]

It's been brought up. I dunno if they'll be in there for first release, but Corth is experimenting with facial riggings and animated normalmaps to see what can be done.

[obscurus]

doom 3 had some OK facial animation in the intro bit, but was that a sort of hard scripted animation? How flexible is D3 as far as facial animation goes? Will it be as easy to work with as UT4K's system, or a royal pain in the arse? Will end users of TDM be able to create custom animations etc without having to import models back into 3DsMax (which many of us can't afford) by using scripting instead?

[oDDity]

No, from scratch you will have to set up fairly complex rigs of bones in the characters heads, weight them to specific vertices and animate the phonemes by hand, then bring in your vocal track and animate it to match.

. If we do it, I'm sure we will provide the source files with character heads already rigged so you'll just have to tweak sliders to your vocal track. You will still require a 3d app. (probably maya)

Edited June 10, 2005 by oDDity

[Domarius]

That's the hard way made slightly easier.

[obscurus]

Any thoughts on the feasibility of using GMax or Milkshape for this?

[FishFace]

or blender?

 

Yes, I have no money. (And use linux, which is always a bugger)

[Domarius]

I'm sure I hear oDDity laughing.

[sparhawk]

Blender is quite fine IMO. I also use it. But then again, I'm not a modeller expert, so ther emight be one or two features missing which I didn't notice.

[FishFace]

2.37 adds softbody/cloth support, albeit rudimentarily.

[Domarius]

Yeah but the facial rigging is a really detailed feature - oDDity would have to re-make his models in Blender for it to work for Blender people.

 

As Ned Kelly said, "such is life".

[FishFace]

Is it not possible to import a format that supports bones?

[Domarius]

Yes but the issues is the controls for the ... phoneneanemseses... or whatever you call them, basically morph targets for each pronounciation the mouth can make. Sure, you could probably convert bones across, but morph targets? I seriously doubt it.

 

Thos controls are what saves you tonnes of time lipsyncing. Rather than having to position every aspect of the lips, and every aspect of the tongue, and also jaw position, for every bit of word.

 

Some middle ground could be reached, but it would be far from ideal.

[FishFace]

Hmm... I've never done proper lip synching, so the concept of morph targets is a bit fuzzy to me... But I suppose it does sound like something that might be handled completely differently by every single application, and wouldn't survive exportion.

 

Well shucks.

[Domarius]

Morph targets (called different things in each app) - basically you position your bones, and save the position as a target. You create multiple targets, all diferent. Then you can "apply" a various amoutn of each, for example, if I had an arm pointing down, and a morph target of it pointing to the front, and a morph target of it pointing to the left, and I applied half of each morph target, the arm would be raised slightly, and pointing slightly to the left.

 

So for speaking, yuo create a target of the face saying the sound "O", and another target for it saying the sound "T" etc. for all the basic mouth sounds. Then you can create full words out of a handfull of targets.

[FishFace]

Yes, that's what I thought. I guess it's down to the exporter to support them, though I'm sure blender does.

[obscurus]

To my knowledge, and I may be wrong because I haven't used it myself, Half-Life and Half-Life 2 allow you to load the sound file of the speech, and you can match it up in the editor. UnrealED for UT2K4 does this, and makes it very easy to lip synch model animations to sound files.... It sounds like D3 doesn't do this, which means those of us without max or maya are going to have problems editing conversation animations... Oh well...

 

I have tried Blender in the past, but found it didn't run very stably, and I found the interface incomprehensible, although I'm sure if I gave it time I would figure it out... Maybe it's worth my while to download the latest version and give it a go...

Edited June 15, 2005 by obscurus

[Domarius]

In my opinion its worth your while to learn something that uses a more mainstream interface, so you can apply it to more 3D apps. Like www.wings3d.com

Edited June 15, 2005 by Domarius

[obscurus]

I am looking forward to the day when you can use speech recognition to automatically create lipsynched animations from a sample file...

[Domarius]

Some games already do this on the fly, but it rarely works well. It's usually based on volume, and you get this bad puppet like effect with the character trying to flap their mouth open and closed in response to the volume, and half the time it never shuts all the way which looks really bad.

[oDDity]

I am looking forward to the day when you can use speech recognition to automatically create lipsynched animations from a sample file...

YOu can already do this, once you've set a few mouth shapes. Even After Effects can do it with 2d files. It will never be totally automated, you will always ahve to set all the mouth shapes first for the main vowels and consonant sounds since individual characters each have their own idiosyncratic facial expressions and mouth shapes when they speak.

Just having one stock set of phonemes and applying them automatically to every character ever made would be useless.

[FishFace]

Good point on the wings3d, dom. For me, blender isn't this god-product that supercedes all other 3D software, it's just that it's free, open source and for the most part, will do a good job. On the other hand, Wings3D seems a little idiosyncratic with its selections and so on, overall harder to use when I tried it. That said, I didn't try it for long, and the first time I tried blender I believe I just went "eh?!" because nearly nothing happened with the mouse. Compare that to, say, C4D (my favourite app that I've tried) where you have an operating you're doing (e.g. translate) and you click-drag to do it...

[Domarius]

I didn't find Wings very idiosyncratic (man, especially compared to Blender), and I've just completed a class at Uni where we had to use 3DS Max to model a video game character, rig it and animate it, and model a 3D level, and drop it into a 3D engine and have them run around in it.

 

Although the controls are different in Wings than in 3DS Max, the concepts are the same, and I find wings actually to be a lot faster and simpler for pure modelling.

Edited June 16, 2005 by Domarius

[FishFace]

I've only used Max once... Can't remember it very well, but it wasn't very appealing. May just be a case of having been "brought up" on C4D.

[obscurus]

I downloaded Wings 3D the other day, and I am really happy with it - for a free polygonal modeller it does the job well, and the workflow is fast and effficient. It does not however export to .ASE or .LWO natively, and I haven't found any plugins or anything that enables it to do this... What is it about those formats that so few open source apps export them? Does Discrete charge a licencing fee to use .ASE or something?

 

I tried a trial version of Max 5, and I have played around with Gmax a fair bit... i must say I liked the software, and I can see why so many game developers use Max, it is a very powerful program with nearly every feature you'd ever need, but it is just way out of my price range - I could buy a car for less... I'll be sticking to the cheapo products, in spite of the pain they cause me when I need to export my models