Blend Shapes

Blend Shapes

Here is the refference I used of the different mouth shapes. Understanding the way the mouth moves is important for lips sync I also learnt from a video posted on the 11 second club. When lip syncing characters you need to show the shapes after or before a spoken word or phrase. This is for accuracy when playing the animation back, other wise it can look more like a bad dubbing and not look as convincing.

http://www.11secondclub.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=10078

image from https://uk.pinterest.com/pin/325385141801081584/

The process 

Here I modeled the different mouth shapes for each set of letters in speech. However when first making the blend shapes I realized the face was too simple in topology. There were a lack of polygons around the mouth, which made it more difficult to make convincing shapes, especially when it came to lips when they puckered. So to resolve the problem I went back and added more topology on a new main head and then deleted the old one. I made sure to delete history on the new head and freeze transformations before re-skinning it and copying over the skin weights from the old head. This now means my face has more flexibility with extra edge loops around the mouth and brows, this adds more freedom of manipulation while looking smoother and more convincing.

 Here is the shelf of many different blend shapes that have all been named to save confusion when making controls. The see will be deleted when I am happy with the blend shapes.

 The blend shapes process overall went very well. I used two different groups to separate group layers . One for the eyelid shapes and the rest for the other facial features. This allowed me to move the eyebrows without manipulating the eyelids. For this I used a paint blend shapes setting to paint out what I didn't want to be manipulated on my two layers. To do this I selected the skin weights for the first layer which consists of most of my shapes not including the eyes. I then started to paint what I wanted to be manipulated and what I didn't. Here on this example the eyes are painted out in blue so they won't manipulate with the the eye brows.
However this lead to a smaller issue, each blend shape was manipulating a bit of the eyebrows which looked unnatural, to solve this I painted each blend shape on the first layer including the mouth shapes painting out the eyelids in blue so they wouldn't be manipulating anything but there chosen area. This eventually created some very successful deformations.

While doing this I was also making my control interface for my whole face. This involved using curves to make the switches and and set driven key to effect the different settings.

Examples

 The blend shapes allow full control over the face allowing to create all kinds of emotions and interesting expressions. This will be key for the animation process.