So I'm making a new film- hoping to do this one FAST
So I finished the first five characters for my new film today... Since I'm modeling and sculpting and texturing and rigging and skinning and doing morphs and all that at full speed ahead I figured I should screen cap some of it or document it or something as it could be useful to someone at some point..
On this one I'M DOING LIP SYNC! So they will like talks and their mouths will move OMG haha- if you follow the podcast you know that I've feared doing lip sync for awhile and oh speaking of the podcast the reason that there are no new episodes is because Screamerclauz had some problems with his ISP and has no internet access for 30 days- he manages the podcast files and all that so yeh...
The issue I always had with lip sync is that I was just using morphs to do facial animation but once I switched over to using joints to animate the jaw now it looks good enough for me to use- so I use a rigged jaw for the open and close stuff and morphs for facial expressions... I'm creating all the morphs in Zbrush...
In Zbrush I use the layers feature to create all the morphs then I export the different morph heads as obj's to Cinema 4d- In both Cactus Dan's tools and the built in morphs you can use the exported obj to create a morph... through drag and drop with the built in morphs and through a command with cactus dans tools... HEY this would probably be a good thing to make a video tutorial for eh?
Also I was going to do all my texture painting in Zbrush for this film as its 9000 times faster and more flexible than Bodypaint BUT I found out that Zbrush isn't really good at painting low poly objects as it paints vertexes- I guess painting in projection master is an option for low poly in Zbrush but Bodypaint paints smoothly on low poly stuff just fine... more tests need to be done on that...
I'm going with a slightly different style with this film... the characters are supposed to be dolls so they have the same constraint based doll part bodies like the characters in HSM but the dimensions are all different... and the textures are all cleaner as they are not made of wood anymore....and yeh they have heads with faces that talk?! ^ ^
My workflow is this- Since I'm making 3d toys or dolls its a very modular process- I mix and match arms/legs/torso's etc....I create the characters body geometry first and rig the bodies using my premade rig so actually the bodies are already rigged... then I model the base head in cinema 4d using basic poly modeling- then I bring that into zbrush and do some low poly sculpting- the heads are only about 1500 polys- then I export the head as an obj and bring it into C4d and paint the textures using Bodypaint...
I'm using a new facial rig with this film so I built and tested that with one character and will rig all the others once their done- its good to test something once you commit to it.... the rig has a basic open and closing jaw which you can rotate and tweak a lot... it also has the brows and cheeks rigged up for animation as well.... not sure how I'm going to do the blinks yet though as I'll want to have an auto-blink system as well as manual control with sliders..
But yeh its fun to be immersed in a new film... if you have any requests of things you want me to post, discuss, make screen capture vids of let me know!
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