Overview of the Tuning Process
On the Tune panel, you can sculpt the deformers to adjust how each region of the underlying soft tissue model will deform the face when it’s animated.
Face Robot addresses many of the difficult technical challenges of facial animation through an elegant abstraction of facial anatomy and a model of how the soft tissue of the face deforms. It allows you to work with many aspects of facial deformation including cheek bulging, nose flaring, lip curling, and wrinkled skin.
Regional face deformers are key elements of the soft tissue model, which is an underlying concept of Face Robot. These deformers correspond roughly to the different muscle groups of the face. They deform different areas of the face to simulate tissue compression, such as the way a cheek creases with a smile, or the way a cheek puffs from inflating the inside of the mouth. The deformers interact with modeled and weight-painted wrinkles and folds on the mesh.
The tuning stage is fairly nonlinear, and the order in which you do things depends largely on personal taste and workflow. You can use any process you like in Face Robot to achieve the results you need. While working through the following steps, you will probably find yourself going back and forth between wrinkle painting, envelope painting, and sculpting. You will also probably need to revisit the deformations as the animation goes along. This is the great thing about tuning in Face Robot: you can go back and forth as you like to continually refine your work.
To get started with tuning, you can use the following steps as a general guide to getting the face into good shape:
1. On the Stage 5: Act panel, move the animation controls around to see how the face is deforming. Generally, you want to hit the big ticket items first: make sure the mouth is working as you expect, and check that the jaw is also moving properly. If your landmark picking or fitting was way off here, you may need to solve the head again before you do any work in the tuning department.
Tutorial #4 - Tuning the Jaw and Mouth
2. Do any major re-enveloping that might be needed (back of head, ears, neck, etc.) — see Envelope Weights. You cannot adjust weighting on the mouth area.
3. Fix up any issue with the points in the mouth region cluster and regenerate the mouth if necessary to make sure that the mouth is deforming properly — see Tuning and Sculpting the Mouth.
4. Paint a basic wrinkle map of the mouth, eyes, and eyebrow/forehead areas — see Painting Wrinkle Maps.
Tutorial #5 - Wrinkle Painting
5. Paint a basic puff map that affects the cheek puffing deformers — see Painting Puff Maps.
Tutorial #13 - Tuning the Puffers
6. Now you can work on the face, region by region, to tune each region deformer's range and strength (see Adjusting the Region Deform Areas), and to adjust the region map through painting.
- Move the animation controls around in each region of the face, or move them into a pose (such as moving the mouth corners in a smile position). Then sculpt that region to have the optimum amount of deformation for each pose, one area at a time. See Overview of Sculpting for information.
- Position the controls into the extreme poses (especially the mouth) and sculpt to the desired goal for each pose.
- Fine-tune the wrinkle map and puff map as you go.
7. Adjust the eye curves and maps for blinking - see Tuning and Sculpting the Eye Lids.
8. Set up the mouth's collision and other mouth parameters to adjust the mouth to your liking - see Tuning and Sculpting the Mouth.
Tutorial #15 - Tuning Mouth Properties
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Interacting with the Act Panel while Tuning
During the process of tuning, you will probably want to go back and forth between the Tune and Act panels as you get the deformations just right with each frame of animation. You can easily return to the Stage 5: Act panel for adjusting the animation by clicking the Act button at the bottom of the Tune panel, or you can press F2 to keep a mini floating Act panel available at all times.
