Quote:
Originally Posted by Testament-Doom
blah blah blah blah......
So, you have your object with the lips.... blah blah blah..... 500 for very huge extremes.....blah blah....hippo....blah blah.....Best of luck and happy modeling!  |
David brings up the basic about setting up morph modifier he's missing a few key points that will make your life easier. If there is anybody to tell you about character rigging, and animation, I'm your man. I have a couple of tips and rules to look out for when I'm setting up the morph modifier.
1: The morph modifier will only work if the morph targets it is pulling from, have EXACTLY the same number of polygons and vertices's as the original model. So MAKE SURE YOU ARE DONE WITH MODELING YOUR CHARACTER BEFORE YOU ASSIGN MORPH TARGETS. I even go as far as animating my entire character so the morph modifier is the last thing i do. I tried copying objects as references but they never seem to work like i want them to so i always have to go with actual copies.
2: Place the morph modifier BELOW the skin modifier on the modifier stack menu. You really don't need your computer spending all that power trying to animate every single morph target.
3: Hide your morph targets, DO NOT DELETE! I have seen some animations where they did not hide the morph targets so you had random people floating there in space. I have also had the experience of deleting a morph target and then later on down the road the morph mod does not work anymore. Never good.
4: Think about how your character will talk. Everyone talks differently, For instance my character, Narf, says his "O"s and "AH"s out of the side of his mouth. Think of a style that might fit your character, like he could spit every time he says his "B" and "P"s
5: Jaw bone. Yes done forget about the mandable, Lots of people do. Sometimes its best to rigg a bone to control the opening and closing of the mouth. especially for characters that have a snout.
6: Set up a control board. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, PLEASE SET UP A CONTROL BOARD! this makes life a lot easier. A control board is a series of nonrenderable shapes that are line via wire parameters to the value of the morph modifier, it kinda looks like this.
It makes animateting so much easier. Rater than going into the morph modifier menu and try to key everything from their, you can just grab the series of splines I set up and yank them into position.
7: break down of lip synch. Alright here we go, Most people's mouth just really stumble through out the words with out really making a distinct shape all the time. However, you must hit your M's, B's, and P's a frame or two before the actual sound. NEVER LATE!! otherwise it will look like a badly dubbed Japaneses film.
The teeth normally show at S's, E's but not always, and O's can come in many shapes and sizes. You just really have to listen to your recording for your characters. which brings me to another point.
8:recording character voices for animation. This is by far the most overlooked area in AVA entries. BE OVERLY DRAMATIC WHEN VOICE RECORDING!!! Throw your voice through a roller coaster of pitches, you will think you sound incredibly dumb, but when you play it back through the animation, if will sound normal. It WILL sound badly if you speak in your everyday normal voice or worst reading from a paper in mono-tone-to-close-to-the-microphone-so-we-hear-your-breath-against-the-microphone voice.