Stop Staring E-Book

Jason Osipa

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 673

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Beschreibung

The de facto official source on facial animation—now updated!

If you want to do character facial modeling and animation at the high levels achieved in today’s films and games, Stop Staring: Facial Modeling and Animation Done Right, Third Edition, is for you. While thoroughly covering the basics such as squash and stretch, lip syncs, and much more, this new edition has been thoroughly updated to capture the very newest professional design techniques, as well as changes in software, including using Python to automate tasks.

• Shows you how to create facial animation for movies, games, and more
• Provides in-depth techniques and tips for everyone from students and beginners to high-level professional animators and directors currently in the field
• Features the author’s valuable insights from his own extensive experience in the field
• Covers the basics such as squash and stretch, color and shading, and lip syncs, as well as how to automate processes using Python

Breathe life into your creations with this important book, considered by many studio 3D artists to be the quintessential reference on facial animation.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Publisher's Note

Dedication

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Introduction

Why This Book

Who Should Read This Book

How Stop Staring Is Organized

Part I: Getting to Know the Face

Chapter 1: Learning the Basics of Lip Sync

The Essentials of Lip Sync

Speech Cycles

Starting with What’s Most Important: Visemes

The Simplest Lip Sync

Chapter 2: What the Eyes and Brows Tell Us

The Two Major Brow Movements

The Upper Lids’ Effect on Expression

The Lower Lids’ Effect on Expression

Eyelines: Perception vs. Reality

Distraction Is the Enemy of Performance

Chapter 3: Facial Landmarking

Introduction to Landmarking

Landmarking Mouth Creases

Landmarking Brow Creases

Landmarking the Tilt of the Head

Part II: Animating and Modeling the Mouth

Chapter 4: Visemes and Lip Sync Technique

Sync: Wide/Narrow Grows Up

The Best Order of Sync Operations

Sync Example 1: “What am I sayin’ in here?”

Sync Example 2: “Was it boys?”

Chapter 5: Constructing a Mouth and Nose

The Best Edge Flow

The Big Picture

Building the Lips

Building the Surrounding Mouth Area

Building the Nose

Continuing Toward the Jaw and Cheek

Building Teeth

Building the Tongue

The Mouth Wall

Chapter 6: Mouth Keys

Order of Operations

Preparing to Build a Key Set

Default Shapes, Additive Shapes, and Tapering

Building the Shapes

Part III: Animating and Modeling the Eyes and Brows

Chapter 7: Building Emotion: The Basics of the Eyes

Building an Upper Face for Practice

Using “Box Head”

Rules of the Game

Example Animations

Continuing and Practicing

Chapter 8: Constructing Eyes and Brows

Building Eyeballs

Building the Eye Sockets

Building the Brow and Forehead

Chapter 9: Eye and Brow Keys

Brow Shapes and Texture Maps

Building Realistic Brow Shapes

Tying Up Loose Ends

Part IV: Bringing It Together

Chapter 10: Connecting the Features

Building the Ear

Assembling the Head Pieces

Chapter 11: Skeletal Setup, Weighting, and Rigging

Skeleton

Eyelid Rigs

Extra Eye Fun

Sticky Lips

Chapter 12: Interfaces for Your Faces

The Two Big Problems of Facial Control

Buffer Networks

Sliders

Skeletal Control

Layered Controls

Corrective, Contextual, XYZ, Half, and Dominant Shapes

Just Interface Me

Chapter 13: Squash, Stretch, and Secondaries

Local Rigs

Global Rigs

The “Real” Character Has No Rig!

Not Using Wraps Changes a Few Things

Tutorial: Rigging Squoosh

Gotchas

Secondaries

Chapter 14: A Shot in Production

Scene 1: Bartender

Scene 2: Lack of Dialogue

Scene 3: Dunce Cap

Scene 4: Salty Old Sea Captain

Scene 5: Pink or Blue?

Scene 6: Great Life

That’s All, Folks!

Index

Gallery: Stop Staring in Color

Scans

Projections

Lighting

Color and Shading

Normal and Bump

Wrinkle Maps

Fur

DOF and Photoshop

Cubey

The Mouse King

Captain Pete

Squoosh

Sally Ann

Acquisitions Editor: Mariann Barsolo

Development Editor: Kathi Duggan

Technical Editor: Paul Thuriot

Production Editor: Christine O’Connor

Copy Editor: Judy Flynn

Editorial Manager: Pete Gaughan

Production Manager: Tim Tate

Vice President and Executive Group Publisher: Richard Swadley

Vice President and Publisher: Neil Edde

Book Designer: Caryl Gorska

Compositor: Maureen Forys, Happenstance Type-O-Rama

Proofreader: Jen Larsen, Word One New York

Indexer: Ted Laux

Project Coordinator, Cover: Lynsey Stanford

Cover Designer: Ryan Sneed

Cover Image: Jason Osipa

Copyright © 2010 by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana

Published simultaneously in Canada

ISBN: 978-0-470-60990-3

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Osipa, Jason.

Stop staring : facial modeling and animation done right / Jason Osipa. — 3rd ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-470-60990-3 (pbk.)

ISBN 978-0-470-93959-8 (ebk.)

ISBN 978-0-470-93961-1 (ebk.)

ISBN 978-0-470-93960-4 (ebk.)

1. Computer Animation. 2. Computer graphics. 3. Facial expression in art. I. Title.

TR897.7.O85 2010

006.6’96—dc22

2010032277

TRADEMARKS: Wiley, the Wiley logo, and the Sybex logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and/or its affiliates, in the United States and other countries, and may not be used without written permission. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Wiley Publishing, Inc., is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Dear Reader,

Thank you for choosing Stop Staring: Facial Modeling and Animation Done Right, Third Edition. This book is part of a family of premium-quality Sybex books, all of which are written by outstanding authors who combine practical experience with a gift for teaching.

Sybex was founded in 1976. More than 30 years later, we’re still committed to producing consistently exceptional books. With each of our titles, we’re working hard to set a new standard for the industry. From the paper we print on, to the authors we work with, our goal is to bring you the best books available.

I hope you see all that reflected in these pages. I’d be very interested to hear your comments and get your feedback on how we’re doing. Feel free to let me know what you think about this or any other Sybex book by sending me an email at [email protected]. If you think you’ve found a technical error in this book, please visit http://sybex.custhelp.com. Customer feedback is critical to our efforts at Sybex.

Best regards,

Neil Edde

Vice President and Publisher

Sybex, an Imprint of Wiley

For my girls.

Acknowledgments

First and foremost, thank you to everyone at Wiley, who did most if not all of the work on this book.

Third edition: Mariann Barsolo, acquisitions editor; Kathryn Duggan, development editor; Christine O’Connor, Liz Britten, and Angela Smith, production editors; Paul Thuriot, technical editor; Judy Flynn, copyeditor; Jen Larsen, proofreader; Ted Laux, indexer.

Second edition: Willem Knibbe, acquisition editor; Jim Compton, development editor; Keith Reicher, technical editor; Rachel Gunn, production editor; Judy Flynn, copyeditor; Chris Gillespie, compositor; Jen Larsen, proofreader.

First edition: Pete Gaughan, development editor; Dan Brodnitz, associate publisher; Mariann Barsolo, acquisitions editor; Liz Burke, production editor; Keith Reicher, technical editor; Suzanne Goraj, copyeditor; Maureen Forys, compositor; Margaret Rowlands, cover coordinator; the CD team of Kevin Ly and Dan Mummert.

For helping with the book and bringing to it so much more than I could alone, I thank Juan Carlos Larrea and Jason Hopkins, animation; Chris Robinson, character design; Kathryn Luster, contact and casting; Chris Buckley, Craig Adams, Joel Goodsell, and Robin Parks for voice work; Jeremy Hall for Joel’s recording.

Professionally, for supporting me and putting up with me, I thank Phil Mitchell, Owen Hurley, Jennifer Twiner-McCarron, Michael Ferraro, Ian Pearson, Chris Welman, Gavin Blair, Stephen Schick, Tim Belsher, Derek Waters, Sonja Struben, Glenn Griffiths, Chuck Johnson, Casey Kwan, Herrick Chiu, Chris Roff, and James E. Taylor. Thanks to all the good people at Surreal Software and everyone at Maxis/EA; the Sims EP team, the Sims 2 team, the Sims “next gen” team. Thanks to Glenn, Brian W., Paul L, Kevin, Clint, Ryo, Toru, Hakan, Frank, and Rudy; to Jesse, Lisha, and of course, the lovely miss Tee; to “fight club,” my robots; to Andy, Sergey, Lucky, Yasushi, Daisuke, Paddy, and Brian Lee! To the best what-if team you could ever imagine: Paul, Brian, Jim, Matt A., Charles, Kelvin, Sean, Damon, Ian, Dale, Matthew, and Howard.

Mom, Dad, Veronica, Tom, Jorge, and all my great family in Winnipeg and Acapulco: I can never quite wait until the next time I get to see you; I’m always thinking of you. Thanks to my California family: you guys have enriched my life more than I tell you; Nick, Ali, Rex, Nina and Nico, Nana, Papa, Brent, Trevor, Rick, Lori, Cathy, and Angela. Thanks to my wonderful friends Nate, Kayla, Jason, Penny, Aurora and Toby, Michelle, Brian, Kelly, Mark, Brooke, Bonnie, Mandy (blame), Paula, Saul, Courtney, Sarah, Pearce, Peyton, Pat, Eric, Tyler, Kavon, Laura, Tanya, John, Peter, Jacques, Karen, Dylan, Wayne, Shelly, Ella, Rob, Casey, Kaveh, Karly, Heather, Jess, Jacob, Adam, Mel, Katy, Jeannine, Rosanna, Jenny, Alison, Alan, Bill, Chris, Stephany, Jenny, Glenn, Galen, and anyone else I missed in our ever-expanding, and always awesome group.

Last but not least, thank you to my beautiful, wonderful baby bears, Alana and Jr. Peanut.

About the Author

Jason Osipa has been a working professional in 3D since 1997, touching television, games, direct-to-video, and film in both Canada and the United States. Carrying titles from modeler and animator to TD and director, he has seen and experienced the world of 3D content creation and instruction from all sides. Jason currently owns and operates Osipa Entertainment, LLC, offering contracting and consulting services for any kind of 3D production, including pipeline and tools design and sales as well as efficiency and workflow training in animation, modeling, and rigging.

Introduction

Animation has got to be the greatest job in the world. When you get started, you just want to do everything, all at once, but can’t decide on one thing to start with. You animate a walk, you animate a run, maybe even a skip or jump, and it’s all gratifying in a way people outside of animation may never be lucky enough to understand. After a while, though, when the novelty aspects of animation start to wear off, you turn deeper into the characters and find yourself wanting to learn not only how to move, but how to act. When you get to that place, you need more tools and ideas to fuel your explorations.

Animation is clearly a full-body medium, and pantomime can take years to master. The face, and subtleties in acting such as the timing of a blink or where to point the eyes, can take even longer and be more difficult than conquering pantomime. Complex character, acting, and emotion are almost exclusively focused in the face and specifically in the eyes. When you look at another person, you look at their eyes; when you look at an animated character, you look at their eyes too. That’s almost always where the focus of your attention is whether you mean for it to be or not. We may remember the shots of the character singing and dancing or juggling while walking as amazing moments, but the characters we fall in love with on the screen, we fall in love with in close-ups.

Stop Staring is different than what you may be used to in a computer animation book. This is not a glorified manual for software; this is about making decisions, really learning how to evaluate contextual emotional situations, and choosing the best acting approach. You’re not simply told to do A, B, and C; you’re told why you’re doing them, when you should do them, and then, how to make it all possible.

Why This Book

There is nothing else like Stop Staring available to real animators with hard questions and big visions for great characters. Most references have more to do with drawing and musculature and understanding the realities of what is going on in a face than with the application of those ideas. While that information is invaluable, it is not nearly tangible and direct enough for people under a deadline who need to produce results fast. Elsewhere, you can learn about all of the visual cues that make up an expression, but then you have to take that and dissect a set of key shapes you want to build and joints you have to rig. You’ll likely run into conflicting shapes, resulting in ugly faces, even though each of those shapes alone is fantastic.

Stop Staring breaks down, step-by-step, how to get any expressions you want or need for 99 percent of production-level work quickly and easily—and with minimum shape conflict and quick, easy control. You’ll learn much of what you could learn elsewhere while also picking up information more pertinent to your immediate tasks that you might not learn elsewhere. Studying a brush doesn’t make you a painter, using one does, and that is what this book is all about—the doing and the learning all at once.

Who Should Read This Book

If you’ve picked it up and you’re reading this right now, then you have curiosity about facial modeling, animation, or rigging, whether you have a short personal project in mind, plan to open your own studio, or already work for a big studio and just want to know more about the process from construction all the way through setup to good acting. If you’re a student trying to break into the industry, this book will show you how to add that extra something special—how to be the one that stands out in a pile of demo reels—by having characters that your audience can really connect with.

If you have curiosity in regard to creating facial setups, or just animating them, you’re holding the answer to your questions. I’ll show you how to get this stuff done efficiently, easily, and with style.

Maya and Other 3D Apps

There are obviously some technical specifics in getting a head set up and ready for character-rich animation, so to speak to the broadest audience possible, the instruction centers primarily around Autodesk’s Maya. The concepts, however, are completely program-agnostic, and readers have applied the concepts to almost every 3D program there is.

How Stop Staring Is Organized

While Stop Staring will get you from a blank screen to a talking character, it is also organized to be a reference-style book. Anything you might want to know about the underlying concepts of the how and the why of facial animation is in Part I. Everything to do with the mouth—all animation, modeling, and shape-building—is in Part II. Part III takes you through everything related to the brows and eyes. Part IV brings all of the pieces together, both literally and conceptually.

Part I, “Getting to Know the Face,” teaches you the basic approach used throughout the book. Each chapter in this part is expanded into detailed explanation in a later part of the book: Chapter 1 in Part II, Chapter 2 in Part III, and Chapter 3 in Part IV.

Chapter 1, “Learning the Basics of Lip Sync,” introduces speech cycles and visemes.

Chapter 2, “What the Eyes and Brows Tell Us,” defines and outlines the effect of the top of the face on your character.

Chapter 3, “Facial Landmarking,” brings in broader effects such as tilts, wrinkles, and even the back of the head!

Part II, “Animating and Modeling the Mouth,” refines the viseme list and sync technique, then shows how to build key shapes and set them up with an interface.

Chapter 4, “Visemes and Lip Sync Technique,” delves deeply into how to model for effective sync and shows that building good sync is less work than you thought but harder than it seems.

Chapter 5, “Constructing a Mouth and Nose,” attacks the detailed modeling you’ll need for a full range of speech shapes.

Chapter 6, “Mouth Keys,” shows you a real-world system for building key sets—one that invests time in the right shapes early so you can later focus on artistry undistracted.

Part III, “Animating and Modeling the Eyes and Brows,” guides you through creating a tool to put the book’s concepts in practice beyond the mouth. From there you’ll learn how to create focus and thought through the eyes.

Chapter 7, “Building Emotion: The Basics of the Eyes,” shows you which eye movements do and don’t have an emotional impact—and how years of watching cartoons have programmed us to expect certain impossible brow moves!

Chapter 8, “Constructing Eyes and Brows,” guides you through building the eyeballs first, then the lids/sockets, and connecting all of that to a layout for the forehead and eventually shows you how to make a simple skull to attach everything else to.

Chapter 9, “Eye and Brow Keys,” applies the key set system from Chapter 6 to the top of the face, bringing in bump maps for texture and realism.

Part IV, “Bringing It Together,” takes all the pieces you’ve built in Parts II and III and brings them together into one head and then shows you how to weight and rig them for use.

Chapter 10, “Connecting the Features,” teaches you to take each piece of the head—eyes, brows, and mouth, plus new features such as the side of the face and the ears—pull all of it into a scene together, and attach them to each other cleanly.

Chapter 11, “Skeletal Setup, Weighting, and Rigging,” focuses on rigging your head, including creating the necessary skeleton and weighting each of your shapes for the most flexibility in production. In this chapter, you’ll learn to use a system to control any eye and lid setup and how to create sticky lips.

Chapter 12, “Interfaces for Your Faces,” demonstrates the benefit of arranging and automating your setup to make all your tools accessible and easy to use. There are ways to share interfaces as well as get very intricate shape relationships with very little work.

Chapter 13, “Squash, Stretch, and Secondaries,” takes all the concepts taught up to this point and turns them a little sideways. This chapter introduces a few key ideas and integrates them into the rig in a way that you’ll start to see your characters really start to bend, and you’ll create a layer of control that can sit on top of any other rig.

Chapter 14, “A Shot in Production,” presents five different scenes through the complete facial animation process, taking you inside the mind of three animators to see how and why every pose and move was made.

What’s on the Website

The Stop Staring website, www.sybex.com/go/stopstaring3, provides all of the tools and scene files you need to work through the techniques taught in this book—source images and audio, and even Maya interface controls that you can use as-is or practice with to learn to build your own. Click the Resources & Downloads link to access chapter files, resources, and extras.

Use the chapter-by-chapter files as you walk through the step-by-step instructions on how to model parts of the face, rig them all to simplify your work, and then animate them quickly and naturally.

Resources include the head models, interface setups, and other elements of the scenes and shapes taught in the book. Here you’ll find a new Maya shelf and scripts (MEL and Python) to speed up your work.

You will also find bonus movies that continue the demonstration of effective animation. And you get several extra sound files to practice animating your own work!

Part I: Getting to Know the Face

Before we start animating, building, or rigging anything, let’s be sure we’re speaking the same language. In Chapter 1, I talk about talking, pointing out the things that are important in speech visually and isolating the things that are not. Narrowing our focus to lip sync gives a good base from which to build the more complicated aspects of the work later. In Chapter 2, I define and outline, in the same focused way, the top half of the face. In Chapter 3, we zoom back to the entire face—the tilt of the head, wrinkles being a good thing, and even parts of the face you didn’t know were important.

Each chapter in this part is expanded into a detailed explanation in a later part of the book: Chapter 1 in Part II, Chapter 2 in Part III, and Chapter 3 in Part IV.

Chapter 1: Learning the Basics of Lip Sync

Chapter 2: What the Eyes and Brows Tell Us

Chapter 3: Facial Landmarking

Chapter 1

Learning the Basics of Lip Sync

In modeling for facial animation, mix and match is the name of the game. Instead of building individual specialized shapes for every phoneme and expression, like for an F or a T, we’ll build shapes that are broader in their application, like wide or narrow, and use combinations of them to create all those other specialized shapes. On the animation front, it’s all about efficiency. You want to spend your time being creative and animating, not fighting with the complexities that often emerge from having a face with great range. It doesn’t sound like there’s much to these concepts for modeling and animating, and, yeah, they really are small and simple—but they’re huge in their details, so let’s get into them.

Before we can jump into re-creating the things we see and understand on faces, we need to first identify those things we see and understand. Starting on the ground floor, this chapter breaks down the essentials of lip sync. Next, we’ll go into how basic speech can be broken into two basic cycles of movement, which is what makes the sync portion of this book so simple. Finally, at the end of this chapter, we’ll take those two things—what’s essential and the two cycles—and build them into a technique for animating.

The bare-bones essentials of lip syncThe two speech cyclesStarting with what’s most important: visemes Building the simplest sync

The Essentials of Lip Sync

People overcomplicate things. It’s easy to assume that anything that looks good must also be complex. In the world of 3D animation, where programs are packed with mile after mile of options, tools, and dialog boxes, overcomplication can be an especially easy trap to fall into. Not using every feature available to you is a good start in refining any technique in 3D, and not always using the recommended tools is when you’re really advancing and thinking outside the box. Many programs have controls and systems geared for facial animation, but you can usually find better tools for the job in their arsenals.

If you’re fairly new to 3D, and have dabbled with lip sync, it has probably been frustrating, complicated, difficult, and unrewarding. In the end, most people are just glad to be done with it and regret deciding to involve sync in their project. We’re starting to see some amazing results come from facial motion capture techniques, but at least for now, that’s probably beyond the cost range for readers of this book. Automated techniques are always improving too, but so far, they aren’t keeping up with what a good animator or capture technique can deliver.

Don’t despair. I will get you set up for the sync part of things quickly and painlessly so you can spend your time on performance (the fun stuff!). If your bag is automation, there’s still a lot of information in here you can use to bump the quality of that up too.

When teased apart properly, the lip sync portion of facial animation is the easiest to understand because it’s the simplest. You see, people’s mouths don’t do that much during speech. Things like smiles and frowns and all sorts of neat gooey faces are cool, and we’ll get to them later, but for now we’re just talking sync. Plain old speech. Deadpan and emotionless and, well, boring, is where our base will be. Now, you’re probably thinking, “Hey! My face can do all sorts of stuff! I don’t want to create boring animation!” Well, you’re right on both counts: Your face can do all sorts of things, and who really wants to do boring animation? Nobody! For the basics, however, this is a case of learning to walk before you can run. For now, we’re not going to complicate it. If we jumped right into a world with hundreds or even thousands of verbal and emotional poses (which is how they do it in the movies), we’d never get anywhere. So, to make sure you’re ready for the advanced hands-on work later, we’re focusing on the most basic concept now: bare-bones lip sync. When dealing with the essentials of lip sync and studying people, there are just two basic motions. The mouth goes Open/Closed, and it goes Wide/Narrow, as illustrated in .