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Leigh's Sketchbook


LJB
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Video of the first run though of animation on the Discovery Channel Latin America demonstration. If you remeber I did part of the texturing here in 3D Coat so i include it here. Animtion done with my own tools based around XSI and rendered under XSI. This is only the first Pass more detail is added with each pass, I will keep you updated, All comments welocome.

Video is HERE!

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The face motion looks a little bit rigid, if you ask me. Could be a bit more natural.

Interesting Comment can you elaborate? we use a Hybrid Mocap and Pose system, And one of the plus point is supposed to be the fluidity and look based from video.

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I like first shot a lot :) very good toward the end of the clip.

(I'm not able top watch second pass,says its private video)

Strange Vimeo Defaulted to making things Private I ammended settings should be visible.

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Interesting Comment can you elaborate? we use a Hybrid Mocap and Pose system, And one of the plus point is supposed to be the fluidity and look based from video.

Hm. Let see.

- I miss the eye blinks in the face. But if the speaking person don't blinks with his eyes, than it is ok. :)

- The most interesting: I have the feeling the base model was modeled with a smiling face. The feeling comes, because there is nearly no position while the animation, where the person have a really neutral face with flat cheeks. He gives me the feeling he is always smiling.

But don't forget: my critique is on a "high level", because your result looks already very good. ;)

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Taros - Thank you as always your comments much appreciated, I would like to share with you, without going into depth too much as this is a 3DCoat forum. Let me explain my processes.

The model as we have seen in previous shots was indeed modelled without a smile, yet at the client requests a smiling freindly character. So I build rules that govern not the poses that the deformers take but how the deformers and solvers change with a given emotional state. We can then either set out emotional states manually and key the degree required or we can drive emotio0nal states by matching motioned poses to set library that change the emotional states dynamically. This differs greatly from current ideologies as Poses or shape animation is usually the taken approach. So we call it a hybrid system. no Actual poses are used more so Emotional rules that control the motion and behaiour of parts of the face at required emotional state. This gives smoother transitions that regular poses/shape animation. This gives a highly efficient system that can not only be driven in any number of methods but can also be used to drive any combination of deformers, Bone rigs, Production rigs, Shaders, anything infact!! Myself and another are currently in development of a middleware application similar FaceFX where we can intergrate this system into any given game dynamic. This should Really Rock and provide a level of detail as yet not achieved in gaming.

In this case the fellow really did not blink much (This kind of Video tracking can be a problem (If actor is not used to enfisising certain areas are nervous) so we can add blinks/Viseme hints manually if i think they are required. Blinks/Viseme hints and other finalisation (Linking and animating shaders/CAV maps (For blending eith normal maps or displacement maps)) are carried out in the last two passes.

Thanks for your comments I will use them to aid final look. Much appreciation!

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... Myself and another are currently in development of a middleware application similar FaceFX where we can intergrate this system into any given game dynamic. This should Really Rock and provide a level of detail as yet not achieved in gaming.

...

Before you say that, you should take a look at this trailer of "Uncharted 2" for the Playstation 3. They use realtime face expressions in their game engine which I've never seen before. Really impressive, espacially the eye-motion. You can feel the emotions.

Of course there are several thnigs, that plays together: the body motions, light, the speakers etc. but a really innovative realtime presentation.

I think, you should know that. :)

Best wishes

Chris

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Before you say that, you should take a look at this trailer of "Uncharted 2" for the Playstation 3. They use realtime face expressions in their game engine which I've never seen before. Really impressive, espacially the eye-motion. You can feel the emotions.

Of course there are several thnigs, that plays together: the body motions, light, the speakers etc. but a really innovative realtime presentation.

I think, you should know that. :)

Best wishes

Chris

The problem alot of current games and in dev games have is you can only animate emotion in detail to the degree of detail that your Bone rig (Facail bone rig) allows. This is becoming less and less of a hinderance, due to different approaches and higher leveling of GPU CPU development.

Yep Im aware of uncharted, and they have done a cracking job. Bare in mind what you see in the video demos i did was with very little tweakery, after moddeling, rigging takes but minutes and and And we load animation to where it is Directly to the face rig. Then we can detail more closley or add remove things. I have only spent a a samll amount of time on discovery so far (as we have not captured the actual footage we will put through), more than enough to get approval and move to the next stage though ;)

We can match emotional content from video or using the rules system add Realtime calculated expression. Though do not miss understand it is not simply a Mocap system. The implimentation of Motion captur alone is extremely restrictive gaming wise, and certainly not applicable to MMORPG, acheiving Emotional capture from Mocap has been quite reasonable in cutscene and games since ninja theory's work on Heavenly sword. That is not really the ideal of what we are trying to acheive.

Yes bodymotion does play a huge part in it and as such our system focuses soley on facial animation but what it does deliver is the abillity to keep everything live in preview. When working through and choreographing scenes you have the abillity to chop and change facial animations all live directly on you motioned character, in fast simple setup. All our Emotitional controls remain Live, no need to bake animation down. All things that thiord part applications like FaceRobot, Face FX do not offer.

Anyhow when we are closer to finalisation of that project I will provide further details. I have already probably shared too much. ;)

- leigh

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The problem alot of current games and in dev games have is you can only animate emotion in detail to the degree of detail that your Bone rig (Facail bone rig) allows. This is becoming less and less of a hinderance, due to different approaches and higher leveling of GPU CPU development.

Yep Im aware of uncharted, and they have done a cracking job. Bare in mind what you see in the video demos i did was with very little tweakery, after moddeling, rigging takes but minutes and and And we load animation to where it is Directly to the face rig. Then we can detail more closley or add remove things. I have only spent a a samll amount of time on discovery so far (as we have not captured the actual footage we will put through), more than enough to get approval and move to the next stage though ;)

We can match emotional content from video or using the rules system add Realtime calculated expression. Though do not miss understand it is not simply a Mocap system. The implimentation of Motion captur alone is extremely restrictive gaming wise, and certainly not applicable to MMORPG, acheiving Emotional capture from Mocap has been quite reasonable in cutscene and games since ninja theory's work on Heavenly sword. That is not really the ideal of what we are trying to acheive.

Yes bodymotion does play a huge part in it and as such our system focuses soley on facial animation but what it does deliver is the abillity to keep everything live in preview. When working through and choreographing scenes you have the abillity to chop and change facial animations all live directly on you motioned character, in fast simple setup. All our Emotitional controls remain Live, no need to bake animation down. All things that thiord part applications like FaceRobot, Face FX do not offer.

Anyhow when we are closer to finalisation of that project I will provide further details. I have already probably shared too much. ;)

- leigh

OK, I've got it. Interesting. Thanx for the little "preview". ;)

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These wings are killing me! Very tedious.

Nearly_Finished_Wings.jpg

It is getting better and better. I believe it, it must be "horror" at the moment. I hope, sometime we will have a good posing tool in 3DC. But I am hopeful. :)

Regards

Chris

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This is coming along great! I can't wait to see him finished. Very inspiring work! :good:

Btw, thanks for the videos. It's quite interesting and informative to watch how someone else works. Especially someone of your caliber. :)

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Jake, Dele - Thank you for your kind words i will persevere. :blush:

Taros - Your so right that blinking pose tool i had the Wing almost done and i mirrord it over and pose tool kiiled the detail and split the feathers So i will either redo the left wing completely morroring the right or add feathers to what I have. For me the pose tool is workable with the lasso stoke but WE NEED TO BE ABLE TO BLUR THE MASK FURTHER The Lasso selection is just too Sharp and this stops the tool working right either splitting or shearing what you pose. Also the USE VIEWPORT FOR GIZMO NEEDS TO WORK CORRECTLY, Currently the axis are still restrained whilst this is option is active? Not how it should function when using viewport based manipulation.

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Getting into using DP far more than B4 and i must say It's far better than Mud box, I have always used MB to texture as you could paint directly on the Texture But 3D Coat does a much better job with NO Horrible jumping at seams it just works beatifully, and I love the Spacebar menu, I will Definitely be using this over MB for all my future projects.

I will add this to the feature requests tab But i would like to see a reticle change when picking

Here's a Shot -

Discovery_DP.jpg

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quick update - All passes complete Note She has a Rather large mass of Hair and a shirt to go on so nothing apart from the face will be visible.

AllPasses.jpg

Any chance we will see this done in one of your excellent videos?

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Any chance we will see this done in one of your excellent videos?

Thanks but Whoa, Let me get to know the DP Side of things a little better first. I'll see how long it takes me to work through her hair tomorrow and try and devote a couple of hours to a texture piece. :)

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Wow cool!

Maybe you could make wings little smaller, and little thiner in the end of small-feathered area (near big feathers starts)?

This is really unbelievable work, I guess I would picture a demon with more bat wings but I think this is really very cool! I didn't realize you could work with such thin surfaces in 3D-Coat without punching holes through the surface. Would be nice to see a video sometime of your workflow.

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Thanks to both, As to Bat wings I though about it But I felt I wanted to achieve a finer different look

Tinker - Yes I would love to manipulate things finer but i currently as im sure can under stand am running into perfomance issues which also leads me to your comment Sgiff - Manipulation of finer volumes is only possible at higher voxel resolutions and currently my Home system is prety maxed when i have everything on display I do have some further Ideas, and will post up once i try, to do with Volume scale and Max brush size, Maybe i finally have something further to contribute the 3dioots voxel thread. I will see later today.

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Ok The way to do it is simply decrease object and Increase density then manipulation of finer volumes is marked easier as max brush size is not needed, big ibcrease in perfomance and work flow I will demonstrate in video later this morning!! Im actually really excited by this!! as the increase in performance is Rather noticable!!!!

Not working I dont know what I did b4 I cant replicate increase in performance??? Maybe i was still half asleep.

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Hi Leigh,

I've made a simple test this morning.

- I skulpted a single feather by using the scetch-tool and some brush adjustements.

- Then I've exported it to softimage.

- In softimage I used "filter points" to reduce the polyamount and to have a "usable" mesh.

- Then I've added a simple "lattice" to the feather.

- After this I began to copy and modify the feathers by using the lattice and some scaling.

- When I was finished, I exported the wing back to 3DCoat and used it as a voxel object.

You can see the result in the images below.

I needed about one hour for all, beginning at the start till the result at the end.

This was only a test, and I know, if someone takes more time for the work in softimage and use more than one feather, then it could be a good workflow.

Just a idea.

Regards

Chris

post-955-1248944156_thumb.jpg

post-955-1248944165_thumb.jpg

post-955-1248944172_thumb.jpg

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Taros - Thanks for that But it's easier to just use the pose tool on the feather directly in 3d coat Create the feather in Modelling pakage and impot to Vox the I created a bunceh of feathers of a different scale and went though and put them on seperate layers then the pose tool can be used effectively on the singkle feather without madness.The trouble you then have is the Wing Voxel resolution if you add something small to a low resolution Voxel layer then you either get just a bunch of lines artifacting or you nothing at all so you have to increase the level of the vox layer enough for the feathers to actually merge to it correctly.

I guess vox' just isnt that great for Tiny little Feathers, just yet too many variables ( Currently with Little in the way of visual reference to Scale of Layer or resolution) to consider on large scale scuplts. Everything would have to go on its own seoperate layer and be independantly scaled down and Though I could see it as a future possibillity I just cant put down that kind of time to this. It all just becomes Unworkable, It like I said previously in this thread would just be far easier to render the Feathers using Splines and instances in XSI. Or you could make a plane and vox' it then use a mask with a wing texture to add detail. and tirm to size the pose away. Many way I think I may try that lats one ;)

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Here is an upper side and lower side of the Wing Upper side shows feathers have to be placed Covex with arch running Up, underside has to be placed Convex. Hence more time taken Large Feathers at ends of wing are sandwiched between these.

post-1266-1248950489_thumb.jpg

post-1266-1248950508_thumb.jpg

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