User talk:^Ben: Difference between revisions

From Valve Developer Community
Jump to navigation Jump to search
No edit summary
No edit summary
Line 1: Line 1:
[[Quick Start Facial AnimationFP]]


== Quick and dirty: Facial animations ==
So you have your character lip syncing perfectly, but he or she is just staring blankly at you. You need too animate the facial muscles contained within the model.
== Starting out ==
First up you need to create a choreography scene, so navigate to Choreography->New... And when it asks you to create a new actor choose the name that's displayed in the bottom right hand corner.
<center>[[Image:Gman.gif]]</center>
You will now be presented with this in the choreography tab, this is your work area that you will use to create a scene for source to play back in the game.
<center>[[Image:Choreo.jpg]]</center>
Right click on gman_high and you will be presented with a list menu, select New->Channel.. and enter audio, and then repeat the process and enter another channel and call this flex_face.
<center>[[Image:Channel.jpg]]</center>
<center>[[Image:Flex face.jpg]]</center>
Audio needs to be added to the audio channel, so right click on audio, just like you did with gman_high and find your newely created sound and add it to the choreography work area.
<center>[[Image:Sound.jpg]]</center>
Then add flex animation in the same way you added audio to your work area, you may need to move the flex animation bar to cover the audio event.
<center>[[Image:Slicer.jpg]]</center>
A usefull tip is to enable "All tools drive mouth" it's hidden away in the control panel, you can find it here.
<center>[[Mouthtools1.jpg]]</center>
You now have everything ready to start animating, make sure the flex_face bar is selected then open up the flex animation tab, you will be presented with this screen.
<center>[[Image:Image29.jpg]]</center>
Each description in the dialogs relate to a facial muscle that you can manipulate, to start manipulating double click on a muscle in the dialog and a more detailed view of that muscle will be shown, to add "keyframe" points hold control and left click in anypoint of the opened muscle and it will add a keyframe to the timeline.
<center>[[Image:Image31.jpg]]</center>
As shown FacePoser will smooth out the time line for you, now all that is needed for you to-do is add more keyframe points and you will have a superbly animated character in no time.
<center>[[Image:Timeline.jpg]]</center>
Hint: This green time bar can be manually slid just hold down left mouse button and drag.
<center>[[Image:Timeslider.gif]]</center>

Revision as of 15:40, 29 June 2005

Retrieved from "https://developer.valvesoftware.com/w/index.php?title=User_talk:%5EBen&oldid=2362"