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This book excerpt is from Jason Osipa's "Stop Staring: Facial Modeling and Animation Done Right" ISBN 0782141293. All rights reserved. Chapter 7: Building Emotion: The Basics of the Eyes, is posted with permission from Sybex.
Well, here we are. What Part II was to the lower half of the face, Part III is to the top half of the face. With the mouth, and mainly sync, the focus is functional-the bulk of the work is in convincing people that the character is speaking. Here, in the eyes and brows, the goals have flipped. The eyes and brows convince an audience that our character lives, and so emotion has priority over function. Our characters plot the things they do before they do them, they react-in short, they think.
First I'll review and expand upon the concepts I talked about in Chapters 2 and 3 ("What the Eyes and Brows Tell Us" and "Facial Landmarking," respectively), and then I'll guide you through creating a tool to see some of those concepts in practice. From there, you'll learn about what I think is the most important part of facial animation, the eyes, and how to create focus and thought. At the end of Chapter 7, I'll go over how some of the different emotions are actually achieved, in contrast to how they've commonly been explained. In Chapter 8, I'll show you how to build the top half of a human face, and in Chapter 9, you'll be guided through the different key shapes and their individual goals and needs. On with the show!
| Chapter 7: Building Emotion: The Basics of the Eyes Chapter 8: Constructing Eyes and Brows Chapter 9: Eye and Brow Keys |
The brows and the eyes tell us what we need to know about a character's thoughts. Primarily, the brows have two major movements, brows Up/Down and brows Squeeze. The brows Up/Down alone don't tell us a whole lot about emotion; they are used in conjunction with the brows Squeeze and different combinations of the lids. Generally, brows Squeeze is in every emotion; regardless of type of emotion, it denotes thought.
The upper lids tell us the alertness of a character, and the lower lids intensify emotions. The eyeballs mainly just communicate where a character is looking. The subtext of that can lead to some powerful emotion, but the eyeballs themselves don't say a whole lot; it's the entire eye area acting together that creates a feeling. That being said, the effect of the angle of the head itself can make all the difference in the world to an expression. It can change the viewer's perception of all the things listed above.
If you need a refresher introduction for any of these topics, take a peek back at Chapters 2 and 3; you should find all that you need.
| Building an upper face for practice Rules of the eyes and brows game Example animations |
In Chapter 1, "Learning the Basics of Lip Sync," you created a simple mouth to work with and got a taste of the mouth setup in action. We didn't do the same thing for the eyes in Chapter 2, so we'll do it here. Many of the behaviors of the eyes are better to see and do yourself than to have me explain them. It really is much better if you can play along.
Everything to do with emotion is subjective. The same choices made for scene A could be all wrong for scene B. This section is going to boil down to the choices I would make in certain situations and the reasons why.
The face I'll use to describe how the eyes and brows work is called Box Head, shown in Figure 7.1. You can load this scene from the Chapter 7 folder on the companion CD, BoxHead.ma.
Figure 7.1: What a handsome face!
| I recommend that you actually go through and construct Box Head by yourself. In Chapter 12, "Interfaces for Your Faces," I talk about expressions, and some more intricate work with expressions, but the majority of setting up your more complicated character is done with the automatic setup buttons (you'll learn about those in Chapter 12). By doing the work here yourself, you can get some good easy practice in expression writing, which, if you want to design your own interfaces, you'll need to know! |
We're going to construct and rig an extremely simple eye area for you to see the concepts I explain. We'll build the face "backdrop," cut out eyes, make flats to represent the brows and eyelids, and make a sphere and flatten it for our eyeballs. After that, we'll load in the spline mouth from Chapter 1 and give Box Head a mouth!
Create a plane of Width 1, Height 0.4 with 10 subdivisions along the width and 4 along the height. By choosing the Z axis option, the plane will be created facing forward in the front view, where we'll do our work with this face.
| Planes can be created by selecting Create > Polygon Primitives >Plane |
Delete the faces that are missing from Figure 7.2. Select the outside edges of the holes and scale them down in Y. Now select the points that define the top of the holes and pull them higher. These will be our eye sockets. Select all the points around the outside perimeter of the grid and scale them out-we want the "face" to have a bigger edge around it. Make the lower edge reach farther than the others, as in Figure 7.3; the mouth will have to live there eventually. Rename the plane "Face." Figure 7.2: The grid with the eye holes already punched out
Figure 7.3: The grid will provide the backdrop for the face.
Create another polygonal plane, this time of Width 0.4, Height 0.1, with subdivisions along width and height of 1. Move this shape to -0.25, 0.2, 0.2 in X, Y, and Z respectively. This is to be our right eyebrow. Create a lambert material and make it black.
| There are many ways to create a material. The fastest is to right-click over the object and select Assign New Material from the bottom of the marking menu. |
Rename the plane "RBrow." Duplicate RBrow, and move it to 0.25, 0.2, 0.2. That should place it on the other side of the face. Rename it LBrow. You should start to see the beginnings of a very simple face.
Figure 7.4: Now, that is some good-looking brow action.
Create yet another plane, this time of Width 1, Height 0.25, with subdivisions of only 1 in both width and height. Move the new plane to 0, 0.2, 0.01 (Figure 7.5). Rename the plane UprLids. Figure 7.5: The upper lid plane is outlined where it should be placed.
Duplicate the upper lid(s) and move it down to -0.225 in Y (Figure 7.6). Rename it LwrLids. Make both eyelids children of Face and then freeze the transformations of the eyelids (Modify > Freeze Transformations). This is done so that later, when we apply expressions, we can be sure the lids' translations at default are 0, 0, 0.
Figure 7.6: The lower lids placed just below the silhouette of the eyes
| When freezing transformations, if it doesn't seem to work, you may need to check your settings in the option box to make sure that all boxes (scale, rotate, translate) are checked. |
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Created: March 27, 2003
Revised: November 7, 2003
URL: http://webreference.com/3d/stopstaring/1
