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3D Max Tutorials – Morph Facial Animation by Merlyn Lear

Nov 22, 2009 3D Max, Tutorials

I would like to present a new tutorial for 3d users, this 3d tutorial create by Merlyn Lear, but i have took the data and other visuals from 3dtotal.com

That is outstanding tricks for beginners in 3d max, because these tweaks are really awesome and so simple for anyone. easy to follow and such impressive results in 3dmax. I like it.

Anyone read and just follow the process, its so simple to learn. i hope you like my post about this tutorial, i am coming with more tutorial in coming days.

Morph process :
1st Step A control model is duplicated a number of times using reference copies. These reference copies will act as the ‘morph targets’. The control model acts as the original model and should be modified if you want to modify all the morph models at the same time i.e. change shape of face, nose, eyes etc. This makes global modifications easy.

2nd Step On each of the reference copies an edit poly stack is added and the mesh is deformed into the right morph expression. If you’re not happy with the shape of the morph add a new edit poly stack and delete the previous added stack. This will revert the morph into its original form. Turning on & off the stack will help you see the changes you have made to the morph

A total of 11 morph targets will need to be created for the primary expressions. Note that the teeth have been included in the morph mesh.

Left / right eye close
For blinks and wide-awake expressions

Left / right smile
For smiles and sulk expressions

Jaw open
For Jaw movements

Jaw slide
For unsure facial expressions

Bottom lip drop
For Speech, grins

Top lip up
For sneering and speech

Kiss
For kiss expressions, speech and wide mouth.

3rd Step Once you have created the morphs you can generate a reference clone of the control model to generate a morpher model. This will be used to blend the facial expressions and used for rendering.

Add a morpher modifier to the morpher ‘render’ head and if needed add a skin modifier placed above it to match it to the characters body position.

(Tip) If you want to copy the body’s skin modifier to the head simply select the skin stack on the body and drag it onto the head.

If you want to copy the skin stack over to the head as an instance simply hold ‘CTL’ and drag it onto the head.The instance stack will appear in an italic slanted font.

This process works best when using envelopes for bones.

To finish off a set of eyes are added to the head and a LookAt constraint is added to their rotations to target a helper point. Simply move the helper point to make the characters eyes look at the point of focus.

4th Step Once you have added the morpher modifier you can load in the morph targets with the ‘load multiple targets’ button in the morph modifier menu. Then simply select the morph targets you wish to use.

With each of the morph targets loaded, you will need to set the morph limits in ‘channel limits’. This option is greyed out when ‘global limits’ are applied in the ‘global parameters’ in the ‘morph modifier’.

(Tip) if you modify a morph target you will need to have this updated in the morph modifier. Click on the update button to have the latest targets reloaded.

Overview :

(Tip) Morphing can also be used to generate random faces. This can be used for crowds where you may wish to reuse the same mesh & morph sets while mixing it with new morphs and texture replacements to generate new people.

Tags: 3D Max, animation, chara, character, Tutorials