Incompetent Secret Agent. Experiment in bone rigging

heyvern · Post by **heyvern** » Wed Jan 10, 2007 12:43 pm

Okay... this is so much fun someone should make it illegal.

I decided to post the latest incarnation here. It started as an experiment to see how far I could go with total bone controls for mouth, face, head turn... everything.

http://www.lostmarble.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=7643

It took a ton of bones and a lot of experimenting but he is turning out great and is so much fun to pose.

Everything you see is controlled entirely with bones including the head turn. There is one main bone that can turn the head in any direction. Separate controls for the mouth to create an almost infinite variety of expressions. And another set for the eyebrows. Still a few more things to do (No bones on the eyes yet so they look a bit "stretched" and he can't blink yet.

).

The cool thing is, I never drew any of these "poses". They happen naturally while dragging the bones around. Just goofing. It would have taken hours to draw all the possible expressions I can get from this rig. And I probably can use this rig for other faces as well. Some tweaking will be required but I won't have to start from scratch.

movie:
http://www.lowrestv.com/moho_stuff/ISA_ ... tions4.mov

-vern

slowtiger · Post by **slowtiger** » Wed Jan 10, 2007 12:51 pm

Quite interesting, and surely a bunch of work.

At least you have proven that one can achieve the same amount of control via rigging in AS as in any sophisticated 3D system.

Some minor criticism: the corners of the eyes shouldn't move that much, if at all. Although the pupils stay round, it now looks like the whole eye is just painted and distorted onto another surface. But in general you have solved the problem of rigid vs. flexible parts gracefully.

heyvern · Post by **heyvern** » Wed Jan 10, 2007 12:59 pm

Thanks.

Yes the eyes. Haven't even touched them yet. At the moment they are only being distorted by the eyebrow bones. I need to add in a few bones for the eyes.

I know now from experience that it can be done. It was so funny to me as I went along... I kept thinking "No way... I can't do this. Control the... eyebrows the same as the mouth?". Every step I kept getting stuck and then found a way around it.

He actually... looks different now then when I originally created him. I like him better now. I look at my original point motion head turn and laugh. It took a while to do that... but this is so much better.

-vern

slowtiger · Post by **slowtiger** » Wed Jan 10, 2007 5:31 pm

No, this is a really great result, and, if you like, it should be posted to the gallery, complete with .anme file, just to show what's possible. Not that I recommend anybody to undergo the same tedious procedure ...

heyvern · Post by **heyvern** » Wed Jan 10, 2007 5:39 pm

When I get this finished and cleaned up, I plan to do a "different" face and post the actual Moho file. I just want to keep this specific character for myself.

I really want to try this technique on a female face next. That will give me some insight on how easily this rig can be transfered to a new character.

-vern

jahnocli · Post by **jahnocli** » Wed Jan 10, 2007 7:01 pm

Great work!

Post by **Víctor Paredes** » Wed Jan 10, 2007 7:28 pm

heyvern, i'm very excited with your technique and i have tried to do it with my stuff. but is hard and the results aren't so good as your character.

can you put a .moho file to see how do you work?
can be a simpler character, i know you want to keep your draws for safety (and can agree with that), it's just i would like to know how do you work with the control bones values, the hierarchy, the quantity of bones, etc.

thanks in advance.

jorgy · Post by **jorgy** » Wed Jan 10, 2007 7:55 pm

Now that is killer!

Just one question - if you're going to be using bones to control the mouth, how would you do lipsync? Would you have to do it by hand since papagayo and other programs use switch layers for the different phonemes?

jorgy

Post by **Víctor Paredes** » Wed Jan 10, 2007 8:42 pm

jorgy wrote:Just one question - if you're going to be using bones to control the mouth, how would you do lipsync? Would you have to do it by hand since papagayo and other programs use switch layers for the different phonemes?

i haven't tried yet, but here is the solution
http://www.lostmarble.com/forum/viewtop ... ght=#34829

heyvern · Post by **heyvern** » Wed Jan 10, 2007 9:08 pm

I will post a file when it is... uh... less ugly.

The bones... oh good grief. I have 151 bones currently. Many still don't have names and the ones that do have names I need to go back and come up with a CONSISTENT naming convention. I also need to put in spaces in the names so it is easier to find eye brow bone left number 4.

My huge complaint right now. the biggest complaint... is not being able to reorder the bones or delete unused bones.

I have groups of bones for lips, eyes, eyebrows etc. They have the same name prefix so I know which one does what but because of the nature of copying and pasting bones and the order of creation, these bones are scattered through out the bone list. Makes it hard to pick them out.

If I delete or change the order of bones I lose EVERY SINGLE CONSTRAINT REFERENCE on 151 bones... needless to say... this sucks. (if the bone is at the bottom of the list I can easily delete them. Any constraint AFTER a deleted bone in the list gets lost though)

But the file is still very easy to work with. I can select the bones visually if necessary and I can hunt them down in the list. Even with that many bones AS does not slow down in any way. Fast as with one bone.

I am reluctant at this point to do any bone deletion or reordering. It works great and you don't really need to do anything with those bones anyway.

---------

I plan to do lip sync by hand at this point. I may play with the DAT file from papagayo and some sort of LUA script and see if I can come up with something to animate actions. But for now lip syncing with this rig is so easy just inside AS I don't have that much of an immediate need for it.

I would like to have that option at some point. It would be nice to load in the DAT and then tweak the motion afterwards. Save some time.

This current character doesn't have dialog anyway for the animation I have planned. I do plan to use this rig for another project which has a LOT of dialog (the main reason I created it).

I will try to get a sample file up soon.

-vern

human · Post by **human** » Wed Jan 10, 2007 11:11 pm

Amazing.

I sure would like to see this turned into a practical general-purpose model that we could actually purchase and modify ourselves.

heyvern · Post by **heyvern** » Thu Jan 11, 2007 12:24 am

I sure would like to see this turned into a practical general-purpose model that we could actually purchase and modify ourselves.

I'm working on that, human.
(I had to add the comma or else it sounds funny

).

Here is a very short "live" demo of the bone controls in action.

The group of bones in the upper left are eyebrow controls.
The group below that are the mouth and jaw controls.
At the bottom center is the head turn bone.
On the right are two "smile" bones.

As you can see the head turn works independently of the all the other controls.

http://www.lowrestv.com/moho_stuff/ISA_live.mov

I plan to put in a vector layer with borders and labels so it is clear what each bone does and where the groupings are.

Gosh dang it I LOVE this rig!

-vern

Genete · Post by **Genete** » Thu Jan 11, 2007 1:02 am

LOL

If you continue puting bones you finally will have more controller bones than points!!!!

It is amazingly awesome vern!!

bupaje · Post by **bupaje** » Thu Jan 11, 2007 1:34 am

Wow, looks really incredible.

heyvern · Post by **heyvern** » Thu Jan 11, 2007 1:38 am

My first lip sync test!

http://www.lowrestv.com/moho_stuff/ISA_ ... c_test.mov

there is a bad bone on the left temple. Pulls the head when I move the eyebrows. Need to fix that.

-vern