This week we worked on joints, teeth and basic animation for our face model.
We started with creating blend shapes in the shape editor, this enabled us to make basic animation shapes by using the grabbing tool for sculpting, and adjusting where we wanted the features to end up at the end of the animation. Then when we selected the slider right to left we see the transition from a natural expression to the changed expression we had made. I did this for smiling, closing eyes, and frowning.
I then did some extra tweaking of my UVs whilst I was waiting for the next part of the lesson. I made the wrinkle lines and eyebrows more smooth on the geometry which made a big improvement.
Next, we worked on adding joints to our face model. For this, we changed to rigging and selected skeleton then create joints. I added 6 joints going from the bottom of the neck, to the centre then towards the chin, this enabled me to have joint manipulation throught the places we needed to move.
I then experimented with rotating the joints and seeing what areas they affected.
This seemed to work, however the eyes were not moving with the head so I needed to fix this. I added the eyes under the selection of the main centre head joint, so it would move along with the head.
Work from home
I still needed to add teeth to my model following through the online recording again. I started by creating a pipe shape, changing its dimensions to the amount of teeth I needed and adjusting the scale and thickness. I then cut it in half.
I then changed it to a smoother surface by pressing 3, and using the lattice tool, changed the verteces to be more rounded and shaped like a mouth.
I then extruded the top faces, and selected off on Keep faces together, so they would seperate. Then, using the move and scale tool I simply adjusted the size and width of them all to appear more realistic.
After this, I needed to seperate the teeth from gums. I created edge loops at the bottom of each tooth to create an indent. After this, I selected the bottom vertex on each tooth and dragged it down to make a more oval shape for the bottom of the teeth, enchancing on the realism we are trying to achieve. I then duplicated the teeth and rotated them so I had a full set of teeth, and placed them inside the mouth bag.
I then added these under the main head joint so that all my components move together.