Wednesday, 2 February 2011

Morph Target Animation

So I was hoping to generate a number of models for potential use of this final year project but after it took me 5 days of very instensive work to get "Skin's" Model done, I think I will just begin animating it. I have worked out I need to generate morph targets for the easisest way to switch between emotions and Visemes (These are mouth positions for individual phonems (Phonems are sounds of which words are auidbly constructed)).

To explain what a morph target is breifly: A morph target is a copy of your base model that has been altered in structure in some way. It is the targeted state for which you wish your base model to alter to. Once you have told whatever software package it is that you are using (In my case it is Autodesk's 3Ds Max 2010) that the altered model is to be considered a morph target, you can begin changing the % parameter in order to adjust how far from the base model to the target you wish the model to alter. Here is a picture to describe... [Images was extracted from Google Images, This is not my work]




As you can see you create multiple instences of your model, i.e one for happy, one for sad, left eye shut, right eye shut etc.. From here the animation is incredibly easy. You can control you model via these parameters shown in the parameter box to the right of the picture. You can alter the models in Max via maipulating the vertices... if they are low poly! However the "Skin" Model now has a 1Million Poly Count.... So I'm hoping I can generate these targets by alterations in Mudbox!

I will be doing this for the next week or so and will update with my progress!

However here is a great tutorial I found on youtube.com that describes how to create and alter using morphs!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2v5uG1tFak
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LL6xY_SywgY 

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