Stage 3: Pick the Landmarks
Working in Face Robot [edit] (http://softimage.wiki.softimage.com/index.php?title=Template:Facial_Animation_TOC&action=edit)
|
After the face parts have been picked, verified and scanned, you need to identify the primary landmarks on the face. Since head anatomies and proportions can vary greatly for human (and especially humanoid) faces, Face Robot needs to know the salient points on your character’s head to guide its analysis of the facial geometry and create the soft tissue model.
The face images at the top of the Stage 3: Landmarks panel guide you through the picking process required by Face Robot. Face Robot needs to have ALL 39 landmarks defined to analyze the face, so you can’t proceed to the next stage until all points have been picked.
Tutorial #1 - Picking Parts and Landmarks
To pick the facial landmarks
1. Click the Start button at the bottom of the Stage 3: Landmarks panel.
Using the reference face image on the panel as your guide, click on the corresponding landmark positions on the face mesh in the viewport.
- Try to position the head so that it matches the camera angle for each landmark as closely as possible. This will make for a more accurate positioning of the points. You can orbit the camera around the head by pressing the o or s keys at any stage of the process. You can also zoom in or out (press z) or dolly (press p) the camera.
- You can click and hold the mouse down while you move the landmark point to exactly where you want. The marker for that point isn’t created until you release the mouse button.
- You can also select and move (press v) or delete the markers as you like, and then continue where you’ve left off by clicking the Resume button.
- If you had selected Symmetric as the DNA type in Stage 1: Assemble, you only need to pick on one side of the face to position the control points for both sides.
- If you make a mistake during the process, just middle-click or click the Revert button to go back a step. Then click the Resume button to continue.
- Right-click or press Enter to terminate the picking process at any time.
- Having a mouth that deforms well depends a great deal on the location of the landmark that you pick for the mouth corner. When you pick the mouth corner point, you want to be very careful that it is exactly in line with the crease that runs inward to form the lip division. To prevent the mouth corner from bulging when opening the mouth, make sure you don't pick the mouth corner landmark too far outside the mouth corner. The goal is to select the area where the inflection point changes from outside the mouth to inside the mouth. The mouth usually has an edge loop that goes directly into the mouth corner, so it is best to use that edge as a guide when picking the landmark.
2. When you’re done picking, press Enter or right-click to end the picking session.
3. Click the Fit button to continue.
Based on the landmark information, the skull geometry is analyzed and the soft tissue is synthesized, creating a parameterized soft tissue model that describes the facial anatomy of the head, and a set of deformers that determine how the face will deform when facial expressions are applied.
The calculations required for this process take a few minutes.
4. When the analysis is complete, go to the next stage: Stage 4: Fit
