Facial Animations

[Springheel]

Continued from the Animation thread:

 

5. Are we going to try and use facial animations for the first release? If so, how does that affect our models? I assume it only matters for the heads.

 

 

5. I'd like to use facial animations, but it might be difficult to add, especially since we'd need a working mouth (unless we just want to do simple things like frowning and such, then it shouldn't be hard).

 

5. Personally I don't think that takes priority over doing the animations we had to cut out (such as a female walk cycle). In Thief you're barely ever face to face with other AI.

 

While I do agree that facial expressions wouldn't be seen very often, I think they should at least take effect when guards are in alert and attacking modes. Seeing a guard taking swipes at you and running at you with his sword drawn baring a totally blank expression would look pretty odd, and would hurt the whole illusion of the AI being an actual character. Also having a facial expression for when a character spots the player would be nice as well, if a guard or civilian steps right up to the player and then sees them, they should at least have a look of shock or surprise on their face. I always found it looked kinda cheesy in the Thief games when a character would make this elaborate jump backwards and raise their arms, yet their facial expression stays as a blank stare. Their face should reflect their actions in extreme situations, at the very least.

 

If this wouldn't be too difficult to impliment (a day's worth of work or less), it would be nice to at least get basic facial expressions for a few of the major actions.

 

[EDIT: As for animating the faces, it's no work in terms of coding, vanilla D3 can already play animations on the "head" channel. It seems like the work it would take is the modelers and animators making some bone structure for the head and the animations to change expressions. I noticed that a lot of D3 characters change facial expressions when they're dead. Maybe it's just a single frame of animation that shifts it into the new state and then it stays there, I dunno, we'd have to look at how they did it.]

 

@Solis re: facial expressions - Maybe just shocked & angry expressions could take priority over the extra movement cycles I wanted to do - but they're still a potential feature cut depending on how much work it is. It will at least take more modelling work, more rigging, and then animating, and then re-exporting all the anims because the bone structure changed. Just like the extra anims we cut out; I think facial expressions are really good, but not nessecary. We did a rigorous feature cut a while back to aim to get this thing out in 2 years, we shouldn't go backwards on that. Complete the essential stuff first, and if we have time for stuff like facials before 2 years is up, great. If we include things that aren't essential, then we'll find ourselves over the 2 year mark with an unreleasable mod becase its still missing essentials.

[Springheel]

I agree with Solis on this one, that it would be nice to have at least some facial animations for basic things like fear, anger and surprise.

 

But I also agree with Dom that it isn't a big priority and it depends on how much work it will take.

 

Do the current heads have a bone structure that would allow facial animations? I'm guessing no.

[Domarius]

That's correct, they don't. (I'd like to check to be 100% certain as with everything else, but I'm at work - but I'm preeeety darn certain anyway)

 

However, I noticed the meshs are allready modelled with facial animation in mind - even the eyeballs are seperate meshes so that they can rotate in the skull. The lips can open too.

 

It would be a matter of creating a rig for all that. This means the character rig is modified, and any existing animations from the old rig would have to be re-mapped to the new rig. This is more work than just re-exporting the animations, but (as I said in the other thread) I don't know exactly what is involved.

 

Then of course the anims have to be created, and then somehow we have to deal with them seperately during the game, so we can say to the head "Be scared" no matter what the rest of the body is doing.

[Ishtvan]

It would be a matter of creating a rig for all that. This means the character rig is modified, and any existing animations from the old rig would have to be re-mapped to the new rig.

 

This wouldn't have to be done if we chopped off the head and considered it as a separate entity, right?

[Solis]

Well, if we want to save time but make sure we don't screw over ourselves later, we could rig it for now and then do the actual animation later on once we get all the more important tasks out of the way. Since the heads are on their own "channel" in the Doom 3 engine, we should be able to add facial animation later and not have to touch or re-export the actual animations for the characters as long as we use the same rig, correct?

 

If we're going to do that, it would be best if we create a rig for the head that covers every potential uses we'd have for the facial animation: eyes, cheeks, eyebrows, several sections along the mouth, jaw, etc. The face is one of the more difficult things to rig, but once it's out of the way it should make doing basic facial animations fairly easy. At least the meshes were made for that, props to whoever modeled the heads and took that into consideration.

[Springheel]

This means the character rig is modified, and any existing animations from the old rig would have to be re-mapped to the new rig. This is more work than just re-exporting the animations,

 

The heads are going to have to be cut off anyway, so won't that require remapping the old rig anyway?

 

It would be interesting to find out how D3 did this. I bet that once the body is rigged properly for not having a head, you can rig the heads however you like without messing anything up.

 

If we're going to do that, it would be best if we create a rig for the head that covers every potential uses we'd have for the facial animation: eyes, cheeks, eyebrows, several sections along the mouth, jaw, etc. The face is one of the more difficult things to rig, but once it's out of the way it should make doing basic facial animations fairly easy. At least the meshes were made for that, props to whoever modeled the heads and took that into consideration.

 

I know that Oddity actually had one of his heads rigged for lip-synching, but I'm not sure what happened to it.

[Domarius]

This wouldn't have to be done if we chopped off the head and considered it as a separate entity, right?

 

The heads are going to have to be cut off anyway, so won't that require remapping the old rig anyway?

Yeah the act of seperating the head into a seperate mesh is also going to cause the rig to have to be re-mapped.

 

 

At least the meshes were made for that, props to whoever modeled the heads and took that into consideration.

oDDity was our only character modeller except for a few models (that aren't in the game yet).

 

It would be interesting to find out how D3 did this. I bet that once the body is rigged properly for not having a head, you can rig the heads however you like without messing anything up.

Actually I think the most logical way they would do this is if the head and body have seperate rigs, and the head is just like any other AF attatchment as far as the game is concerned, but it also happens to have its own animations.

[Ishtvan]

Actually I think the most logical way they would do this is if the head and body have seperate rigs, and the head is just like any other AF attatchment as far as the game is concerned, but it also happens to have its own animations.

 

I believe that's how it's set up in Doom3, although I'm not sure, because there's a "head" anim channel defined on the AI itself, and animations are usually played in the script of the entity itself. The head channel may be a hack that lets you play anims on the head from the AI entity script. In any case, taking a quick look at the talking D3 NPCs in marscity should reveal how to do it.

[Springheel]

I saw something in the monster_def file about certain animations being stored and applied to whatever head was attached. You wouldn't want the head to be acting totally independently of the body.

[Domarius]

Yeah I can see it now too. monster_default.def, line 108, starts talking about what bones control the eyes.

 

That doesn't nessecarily mean the body shares the same rig as the head - that could just mean it finds the bone specifically in the head rig. Also, that stuff is controlled with code (head looking and eyeball looking). What part did you see that was referring to animation?

[Springheel]

It was this line in monster_default.def:

 

"editor_var head" "Name of entityDef to attach as character's head. Copies animation from certain bones into the head model."

 

 

My guess is that means you can, frex, have an animation where the character looks down at his belt to draw his sword without worrying that the head will just act independently when you attach it. But I don't know what "certain bones" means or how you know which ones.

[Domarius]

Ah cool - well I guess it's my job to find out exactly what "certain bones" are and how Doom knows about them.

[Springheel]

Are you registered over at the Recall to Hell mutual assistance forums? There may be people there who have worked with head swapping already.

[Domarius]

Yep I am, I'll go ask there.

[Springheel]

There's one assumption that I'm making here that I can't verify. I'm assuming that rigging a head for facial animations has no impact whatsoever on the base AI model. You could take the Hazmat guy and put a non-rigged head or a rigged head on with no problems. Only thing I'm unsure of is how you 'link' the facial animations of a rigged head to the body, to make sure they look angry during attack animations, or whatever.

 

If that assumption is true, then we could continue to work with non-animated heads like the ones we have now, and create new, rigged heads slowly as we go, eventually phasing the non-animated heads out.

[Ishtvan]

My understanding is that the animation on the body only covers up to the neck joint, and then the head is a fully separate entity. So I would think that you wouldn't have to change the rigging of the body after the first time you chop off the head, regardless of how the head rigging changes.

[Domarius]

I can't truthfully answer your question Spring, but I can't imagine how it would affect the base mesh... I would like to think we can continue on as you described.

[oDDity]

You can add any head to any AI at any time. You just have to change it's def file afterwards.

HOwever, there is a lot of technical nonsense about setting up a little triangle maker in fornt of the eyes that the charcater uses as a focus point etc, which will have t be looked into on the doom forms.

[Springheel]

It seems like we may even be able to use some existing D3 heads that are already set up for animations. This one would make a fine townsfolk or house guard head, and it's already rigged for expressions and limited lipsynching.

 

[Domarius]

Good idea.

 

Heh, some people are gonna go "Hey, it's the scared guy from the service tunnel, he's back!"

[Springheel]

I'd be surprised if anyone recognized him with a different body and voice. It's a fairly generic head.