atheist
Neophyte
Joined: 06 Sep 2006
Posts: 31
Location: Various parts of Canada
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 Posted: Thu Sep 07, 2006 1:05 am Post subject: Facial Animations |
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Alrighty, I guess not many people know how to do the facial animations, so I'll just post about what I know. I'll just make a simple singing animation. 
First thing you need to do is open the Female04_Anime01_IdleStandingPoseMASTER.max file. Get in the front viewport and zoom in on the face. Go to the modify panel (blue arc thing), and click Morpher in the modifier stack. You should see the same as this:
Then scroll down to the Channel List These are all the seperate morphs for the face. There are 79 of them in total. For this tutorial, all we're gonna use is channel mouth.OH.Exclusive and mouth.Open.Exclusive. Scroll down inside the channel list to these morphs, they are number 54 and 55.
Notice all the channels have a dial beside them, all at 0.0 for default. This is the percentage of the morph that is applied. Try playing around with some of the dials if you want, get a feel for how it all works. You can make some strange faces doing this  .
Ok, once you've gotten a bit of an idea how the morphs work, get them all back to 0.0, you want the avatar's face to be in the "idle" pose for your animation to start. Then, click the Auto Key button on the bottom of the Max window, it should turn your timeline bar red. (I forget if it does this before Max 8, sorry)
Ok, now just scroll to frame 5 or so and dial the mouth.Open.Exclusive channel up to 20 or so. You'll notice 2 little rectangles that show up in the timeline bar. These are keyframes. If you decide you don't like your animations, select them and delete them. Your avatar's mouth should open slightly as you dial this up.
Now, if you drag the timeline seeker (that bar that says 5/120 right now) back and forth from frames 1 to 5, you'll notice the avatar's mouth goes from completely closed to partway open. Now, just go to frame 10 or so, and dial the mouth.OH.Exclusive channel up to 80 or 100. This opens the mouth much wider. You see another rectangle pop up in the timeline at frame 10, because you just set another keyframe. You can leave the mouth.Open.Exclusive channel at 20 for this whole animation.
Ok, now all you do is just go ahead and keep scrolling higher in the time line, adding keyframes wherever you want. Remember that the whole 120 frames is equal to 4 seconds of run time, so don't bother being too precise or putting in keyframes every 2 frames or something. Use the timeline seeker and/or playback buttons (circled) to check your animation as you make it, if you think it is moving it's mouth too fast, you can select the keyframes by clicking them (see arrow), and drag them furthur down the timeline, to slow the change down. Don't forget to end the animation with both mouth.OH.Exclusive and mouth.Open.Exclusive set back to 0, so your avatar blends back into the "idle" face posture.
Ok, now we've gotten an animation that we're happy with (You can see all my keyframes), make sure it looks about right when you play it using the controls, save your max file as singing.max or something, name doesnt matter. Turn off the Auto Key, and make sure the head mesh is selected. In the Imvu tutorial, it says select the PelvisNode or something like that, ignore them, they're wrong. Go to export.
Ok, now browse to wherever you want to save it, and save it as sing.xpf or something. The sing part doesn't matter, just make sure it's an xpf file. Also, scroll down in the
Save as Type box and choose Cal3D MorphAnimation File (*.cpf, *.xpf).
Click export, and in the next window, since our animation is the full 120 seconds, just leave it as is. Click Finish, and you're done the animation part. Close Max and open Previewer.
Once you've got previewer loaded, derive from product 2083. I'm just using that because it's an already made facial action, so its easy to change. You may notice this is the action that takes place whenever you type "lol" in chat. Anyway, go to the Edit Action tab, and try clicking Play This Action. The avatar in the window should laugh like it does in chat.
Scroll down into the red box called Ensemble Variation 0. Under Morph Animation 0 there will be a file called chatLol.xpf. Click Browse and replace it with your xpf file. Also, delete the Female04_Anime01_Chat_LOL.xaf file listed under Skeletal Animation 0. That's to move the body, and that's a different tutorial than this one.
Now scroll back up and hit Apply Changes if you have auto-refresh turned off like me, and then Play This Action. The avatar's face should play through the animation we created earlier.
And that's it, you've made a facial morph animation! Of course, this was a very simple one, you can make them using eyebrows, tongues, mouthes, etc.
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