Character Rigging with more 3D details etc - Questions.

[Psynema]

Rough test with smart bones and mouth movements etc.

QUESTIONS

1. Can you/is it suggested to do phonemes with smart bone dials instead of switch layers for better motion or will that junk things up a bit ? I also was curious because I'd like to do a matte free/nested layer free mouth with just one layer and shapes over each other so I could use the perspective tool for head turns as I have a hard time getting the mouth to line up using the layer tool (there's no layer perspective tool, just a shear tool, which doesn't work that well for perspective).

2. I really would love to make a smart bone for a full body turn and retain the skeleton for walk cycles from both sides and going forward - is this a stupid idea/not practical? If it's doable, I want to do it.

3. Is there a way to smooth out movements with multiple smart bones? IE - as you can see in the sample below, I can tilt the head up/down and to the side ok, but combining them causes issues. Is there a workaround?

Is Rudigers Morph Dial script still around and good for ASP 10 or is it too old?

THanks.

[neeters_guy]

1. Can you/is it suggested to do phonemes with smart bone dials instead of switch layers for better motion or will that junk things up a bit ?

It's a matter of personal preference I think. Lip sync using switches is a well-established technique and is fast. Whereas smart bones give you more control, but it’s more of a hassle to set up and implement.

2. I really would love to make a smart bone for a full body turn and retain the skeleton for walk cycles from both sides and going forward - is this a stupid idea/not practical? If it's doable, I want to do it.

Smooth full body turns using smart bones (for the type of character in your demo) isn't really feasible. However, limited body turn is very workable, so my suggestion is to accept the fact you’re going to need multiple rigs to cover a variety of views.

3. Is there a way to smooth out movements with multiple smart bones? IE - as you can see in the sample below, I can tilt the head up/down and to the side ok, but combining them causes issues. Is there a workaround?

You can reduce the amount of unpredictability by limiting point movement to one axis. This works well for something like eye movements. It’s more complicated with head turns. You’d have to make sure that in the up/down action, the points only move vertically, and in the side-to-side action, only horizontally.

Or you could designate a smart bone dial for a single effect that isn’t meant to be mixed with other bones, or at most, only one other bone. Obviously the fewer dials there are, the more predictable the interactions are (see point 2).

Is Rudigers Morph Dial script still around and good for ASP 10 or is it too old?

Smart Bones has largely replaced Morph Dial script (by Rudiger’s admission), and the script doesn’t work in v10. It was a pretty neat script in its day though, but being a layer script, it tended to made AS performance slow to a crawl.

Anyway, those are my opinions. I don't mean to be discouraging. Your demos look pretty good, so who knows? Maybe you’ll be that guy to discover a new way to rig.

Good luck!

[Psynema]

Thanks for the points/axis tip. And guess what? It's not perfect but I just went ahead and tried the-walk cycle using a full body turn smart bone, SAME SKELETON, idea.



Yep there's plenty of stuff I want to work on...but considering it's a first attempt it does seem possible.

[Bossco]

I learned the hard way. It's difficult.
I wish I'd known at the time what neeters_guy above described about ensuring that you move the points vertically when turning the head horizontally.
What I found is that in some cases you can do a good enough job of facial features as long as you take into account how the shapes will react at different stages of a head turn.
The mistake I made is that I created a sort of Looney Tunes/Disney character design. The eyes were almond shaped and slightly angled. I created eye morphs for blinking with smart bones. It looked just right. Then when I implemented the head turn the morph shapes for the eyes screwed up and ended up skewed.
You have to take great care with how you move the points in the morph. If the shape allows you to move the points vertically in a horizontal head turn, then you can be successful along the range of motion. If you need to move the points diagonally, as I did, then the shapes veer way off into shapes you don't want.

Try it out with a very simple test character. With a very simple design you can probably pull it off. However once you start trying to be a bit more free with your design and add real character you may find that the shapes are too asymmetrical to work well.
I was talking about eye blinks in my specific example, I just wish there was a way that when performing the eye blinks during a head turn there was a way for the eye blink morph to know what position the head turn is in at the specific time and then naturally switch to an alternative eye blink morph depending on the face position. I couldn't work out if that was possible or not.
Mind you, nowadays this software and the people who use it on here never cease to amaze me with new developments they've achieved by trying different things out.

I think that there can be a tendency for most of us to want to try to create a rig that does it all in one. I'm as guilty of this as anyone. But I think neeters_guy is right that sometimes it's just easier to just use a switch layer and switch rigs, or 'cheat', or do any trick which just works. It's worth considering that most people will treat an element of animation as one scene which will be edited when watching the final performance. So creating a rig which does it all may be more time and effort than it's worth. If you think of your final animation, then you could think of each edit in terms of being different Anime Studio scenes. You don't always need to see your character moving around fluidly and as one doing fancy turns. In fact in professional animations you see how often do you?

If you're doing eye blinks, unless you want a lot of blinking, it may be less effort and make more sense to create the basic head movements first with morphs, and then to go over the animation as a second pass creating the blinks by using point movement. In some scenes you could perhaps do this with the mouth too.
If you're doing dialogue I'd just keep the head still for the most part if you can and/or only move the head when the character has a brief pause and has stopped speaking for a second.

[neeters_guy]

@Bossco Thanks for sharing your experience and
@Psynema that test video.

Along the same lines, check out dkwroot's posts on creating corrective actions:

2.5D head with corrective smartbones (now with tutorial)

No doubt head/body turning techniques will continue to develop when v.11 is released.

[TheMinahBird]

Has any method with 11 been made that can do this?

[GCharb]

As neeter_guy said, it is a matter of taste, ont thing that is often useful is automated lip-synch, which only works with switch layer, personally I tend to animate the face manually with point motion, again, a matter of style and preferences!